What would this mean for Java gaming? Would it mean anything at all? Would this help JavaFX(random question)?
I would say it means nothing at all to gaming.
So the performance boost would not, in any way, contribute to better framerates?
Here is another article on the subject(there are many, this is the last one I will link in order to prevent annoyances).
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-08-2013/130826-hsa-targets-parallel-execution-for-jvm.html
I think Project Sumatra and also Graal and Truffle will be very important for the future of the JVM. Oracle is not alone either, AMD has big plans for Java performance. For now though, the problem is two-fold:
a) We won’t have a useful implementation until Java 9. That’s 2016, 2+ years from now. Java 8 will be the major feature release (lambdas) and Java 9 the major performance one (HSA plus Arrays2.0/PackedObjects/Structs/whatever).
b) I personally don’t think automatic offloading to GPU is going to fly on current PC architectures. The non uniform nature of memory, i.e. separate virtual address spaces for CPU and GPU, is very hard to program on and even harder to optimize for. Even with manual effort, very few types of workload are actually accelerated by taking advantage of the GPU, the transfers between CPU and GPU memory are simply too costly. Hacks like CUDA 6’s Unified Memory may simplify programming, but do nothing about actual performance. Next-gen APUs (e.g. AMD’s Kaveri) will fix this problem and only then can I see general purpose Java code easily optimizeable on there. So, we’re again talking about a few (many?) years for such architectures to grab enough market share.
In any case, we’ll have to wait.
Yes, I could see that this will be only beneficial to future hardware. I was just wondering what kind of gains we could see in games from these things; I guess it is just speculation for now. Thanks for the replies!