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> NVidia doesn't have a scalar architecture in any meaningful sense of the word. While I agree with your post in general, I'm not totally in agreement here. If
by Joky 8y ago
> NVidia doesn't have a scalar architecture in any meaningful sense of the word.
While I agree with your post in general, I'm not totally in agreement here. If you look at the context in which G80 and CUDA were introduced, it has a significant scalar dimension: for a single "thread" writing an addition between two float3 ended up being executed as 3 separate additions on the scalar components of the vector. This was, if I remember correctly, a departure from previous architecture optimized for graphic processing.
In this sense the ISA is/was mostly scalar.
- atq2119 8y agoThis also applies to AMD GCN, though. So if you compare GCN to the earlier TeraScale architecture, you could argue (like a sibling comment does) that AMD's GCN is a scalar architecture and so is Nvidia's. If you look at the actual hardware, though, they're clearly both vector architectures: each "core" has N SIMD-style lanes executing the same instruction simultaneously; it's just that each of those lanes corresponds to a different work item of the compute dispatch. This applies equally to AMD's and Nvidia's architectures.