[robmaister]

AMD GCN absolutely supports async compute[1]. Radeon cards for years would only make use of the ACEs in pure compute contexts, as OpenGL and DX11 had no concept of a secondary command queue and could not make use of them. This is a big part of the reason why Vulkan/DX12 require so much boilerplate to get a triangle rendered.

The PS3's SPU definitely counts as async compute especially with how it was used later in the console lifecycle[2] once people had time to familiarize themselves with it.

However, in the current gen consoles, you don't have to deal with a different ISA, command queuing, and shared memory between the GPU and CELL processor. You are only writing HLSL/GLSL/PSSL and setting up an aggressive amount of fencing to transition resources between readable and writable states within the GPU.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynch... [2]: https://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/spubased-deferred-shad...