The CUDA Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to GPU Programming

Chapter 2. Hardware Architecture

This chapter provides more detailed descriptions of CUDA platforms, from the system level to the functional units within the GPUs. The first section discusses the many different ways that CUDA systems can be built. The second section discusses address spaces and how CUDA’s memory model is implemented in hardware and software. The third section discusses CPU/GPU interactions, with special attention paid to how commands are submitted to the GPU and how CPU/GPU synchronization is performed. Finally, the chapter concludes with a high-level description of the GPUs themselves: functional units such as copy engines and streaming multiprocessors, with block diagrams of the different types of streaming multiprocessors ...