GPU Architecture and Programming∗

With discovering capabilities of Graphic Processors to solve complicated mathematical problems and parallel execution of thousands of threads, Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) became an interesting area to research. Rapid growth of 3D game market, performance im-provements of GPU chips and their programmability during last decade boosted research activities in this field, and revealed more potential applications for GPU programming. This report provides a survey on the emergence of GPUs, their architecture details and programming via step by step introducing key elements and modules involved in modern GPUs. Chapter one, introduces a history on graphics adapters and their evolution, and later on, explains the cause of scientific popularity of GPUs; general purpose computation on GPUs (GPGPU). In chapter two, a review on graphic’s structure including elements, functions and pipeline is explained. Then, chapter three discusses data parallelism, the methods, models and architecture required to handle it. In chapter four, modern GPU’s architecture, its memory, and Cayman a new paradigm from AMD Company, is declared. Also, programming of GPUs will be investigated in chapter four. This would be done through discovering and classification of different layers of the AMD Software Stack