What is a GPU?
A GPU is a heterogeneous single-chip processor that is highly tuned for graphics. As for graphics, we have to do many simple computations for each and every pixel, and the first optimization that presents itself is to increase the parallelism.
A GPU is partitioned in streaming multiprocessors (SMs), which are also called compute units (CUs), and that can be seen as an equivalent of a CPU core. However, each SM comprises many more arithmetic-logical unit (ALUs, also known as execution unit) than a traditional CPU. For example, NVIDIA GeForce 1080Ti card comprises of 28 SMs, each of them containing 128 ALUs! Different than in a CPU, the execution units are not used to form a pipeline (and thus to optimize the latency) but are ...
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