CPU SIMD Vs GPU SIMD?


Answer :

Both CPUs & GPUs provide SIMD with the most standard conceptual unit being 16 bytes/128 bits; for example a Vector of 4 floats (x,y,z,w).



Simplifying:



CPUs then parallelize more through pipelining future instructions so they proceed faster through a program. Then next step is multiple cores which run independent programs.



GPUs on the other hand parallelize by continuing the SIMD approach and executing the same program multiple times; both by pure SIMD where a set of programs execute in lock step (which is why branching is bad on a GPU, as both sides of an if statement must execute; and one result be thrown away so that the lock step programs proceed at the same rate); and also by single program, multiple data (SPMD) where groups of the sets of identical programs proceed in parallel but not necessarily in lock step.



The GPU approach is great where the exact same processing needs be applied to large volumes of data; for example a million vertices than need to be transformed in the same way, or many million pixels that need the processing to produce their colour. Assuming they don't become data block/pipeline stalled, GPUs programs general offer more predictable time bound execution due to its restrictions; which again is good for temporal parallelism e.g. the programs need to repeat their cycle at a certain rate for example 60 times a second (16ms) for 60 fps.



The CPU approach however is better for decisioning and performing multiple different tasks at the same time and dealing with changing inputs and requests.



Apart from its many other uses and purposes, the CPU is used to orchestrate work for the GPU to perform.



It's a similar idea, it goes kind of like this (very informally speaking):




  • The CPU has a set amount of functions that can run on packed values. Depending on your brand and version of your CPU, you might have access to SSE2, 3, 4, 3dnow, etc, and each of them gives you access to more and more functions. You're limited by the register size and the larger data types you work with the less values you can use in parallel. You can freely mix and match SIMD instructions with traditional x86/x64 instructions.

  • The GPU lets you write your entire pipeline for each pixel of a texture. The texture size doesn't depend on your pipeline length, ie the number of values you can affect in one cycle isn't dependant on anything but your GPU, and the functions you can chain (your pixel shader) can be pretty much anything. It's somewhat more rigid though in that the setup and readback of your values is somewhat slower, and it's a one shot process (load values, run shader, read values), you can't massage them at all besides that, so you actually need to use a lot of values for it to be worth it.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Converting A String To Int In Groovy

Answer : Use the toInteger() method to convert a String to an Integer , e.g. int value = "99".toInteger() An alternative, which avoids using a deprecated method (see below) is int value = "66" as Integer If you need to check whether the String can be converted before performing the conversion, use String number = "66" if (number.isInteger()) { int value = number as Integer } Deprecation Update In recent versions of Groovy one of the toInteger() methods has been deprecated. The following is taken from org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.StringGroovyMethods in Groovy 2.4.4 /** * Parse a CharSequence into an Integer * * @param self a CharSequence * @return an Integer * @since 1.8.2 */ public static Integer toInteger(CharSequence self) { return Integer.valueOf(self.toString().trim()); } /** * @deprecated Use the CharSequence version * @see #toInteger(CharSequence) */ @Deprecated public static Integer toInteger(String self) { return toInteg
Read more

"Cannot Create Cache Directory /home//.composer/cache/repo/https---packagist.org/, Or Directory Is Not Writable. Proceeding Without Cache"

Answer : if anyone pass through here, this is shorter solution: sudo chown -R $USER $HOME/.composer it seems to me the group information is missing in your command sudo chown -R <user> /home/<user>/.composer/cache/repo/https---packagist.org Shoud be sudo chown -R <user>:<group> /home/<user>/.composer/cache/repo/https---packagist.org But to avoid other permission issues, I would rather advise: sudo chown -R <user>:<group> /home/<user>/.composer/cache (you'll need access to other folders in there) and sudo chown <user>:<group> /home/<user>/.composer To make sure your user has permissions enough on the global composer folder. Mind the missing recursion so the user don't own keys created by root. If you need to find out the group: groups <user>
Read more

Android How Can I Convert A String To A Editable

Answer : As you probably found out, Editable is an interface so you cannot call new Editable() . However an Editable is nothing more than a String with Spannables, so use SpannableStringBuilder: Editable editable = new SpannableStringBuilder("Pass a string here"); If you only want to change the Spannables, never the text itself, you can use a basic SpannableString. Use Editable.Factory.getInstance().newEditable(str) From the android documentation: Returns a new SpannedStringBuilder from the specified CharSequence. You can override this to provide a different kind of Spanned.
Read more