3 ms·
You are interpreting the title literally, while all this article is trying to do is to give an introduction to anyone who wants to get into GPU programming. No
by crabbone 3y ago
You are interpreting the title literally, while all this article is trying to do is to give an introduction to anyone who wants to get into GPU programming.
Now, about every developer. Ideally, developers should know something, in general, about all fields related to programming. Similar to how in medicine you need to learn about different branches of medicine, even though you'll specialize in one, and so it is in mathematics, physics and so on.
Presently, the demand for quality professionals in programming is very low. There aren't any good testing or certification programs that can tell a good programmer from a bad one. The industry is generally happy with "specialists" who perhaps only know to do one thing, somewhat. So, presently you don't need to know anything about GPU or any other field that's not directly related to your job description.
----
Now, about the article itself. While it gives a lot of valuable factual information, it's missing the forest for the trees. It's very dedicated to how CUDA works or some other particular aspects of NVidia's GPUs. The part that's missing is the part that could make it, potentially, a candidate for the kind of introduction to GPU programming that would make it worth reading to expand your general understanding of how computers work.
If you ever paid attention to how encyclopedic articles are written: the structure of a definition given by encyclopedia often has two components. First puts the object of the definition into the more general category, second explains how the object of the definition is different from other elements of the category. What the GPU article is missing is the first component: putting GPU programming into the more general category. This, in practical terms, means that questions like "is DPU programming anything like GPU programming?" or "can `smart' SSDs (with FPGAs) be treated similar to GPUs?" unanswered.