Information on current GPU Architectures

Question

I have decided that my bachelors thesis will be about general purpose GPU-computing and which problems are more suitable for this than others. I am also trying to find out if there are any major differences between the current GPU architectures that may affect this.

I am currently looking for some scientific papers and/or information directly from the manufacturers about the current GPU Architectures, but I can't seem to find anything that looks detailed enough. Therefore, I am hoping that someone may be able to suggest some papers or at least point me in the right direction.

Thank you

I am very surprised that your search didn't turn up [this paper](http://www.stuffedcow.net/research/cudabmk), which is just about the last word on 3rd party analysis of a modern DX10/DX11 GPU architecture. — talonmies, Feb 12 '12 at 13:04

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 20 '14 at 10:31

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Read litterature about OpenCL and Cuda. Perhaps OpenGPU project site might give more links.

_{GPU manufacturers usually don't want to give detailed information. ATI seems to tell more than Nvidia. Some of ATI GPU chips have published VLIW instruction sets.}

The trend is to give (e.g. in OpenCL runtime) several functions to query the hardware, and then enable you to tune your (OpenCL) application to what the hardware wants.

edited Nov 20 '14 at 10:31

vichle

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answered Feb 12 '12 at 12:28

Basile Starynkevitch

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Thank you for your answer, this seems helpful as well :) – vichle Feb 12 '12 at 13:27

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 01 '12 at 16:37

This paper from NVIDIA provides some details on their Tesla architecture:

NVIDIA Tesla: A Unified Graphics and Computing Architecture

Of course, Tesla is one generation old at this point; I have not seen a peer-reviewed publication describing Fermi, NVIDIA's latest architecture. The best information from NVIDIA on Fermi may be in this white paper:

NVIDIA’s Next Generation CUDA Compute Architecture: Fermi

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of similar papers from AMD/ATI. I have seen a few third party papers that do provide some information; for example:

A Micro-benchmark Suite for AMD GPUs

One of the best third party sources of architecture information, in my opinion, is Real World Technologies. Here are some relevant articles from RWT:

Information on current GPU Architectures

2 Answers2

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