Looking for papers on GPU architecture

[Rayden]

I am trying to find sources on graphics processor architectures and I cannot find anything. I'm looking for a high technical level. Here is an article on the Itanium which is what I am looking for. Anyone know of any sources? I've done a little bit of searching on Google as well as on EBSCOhost and have been unable to find anything.

 

[Aluvus]

You mean that article is of the format you want? Is there a particular GPU you're looking at?

I was able to pick up a pretty interesting paper on GeForce 6 architecture (warning: large PDF) via a Google Scholar search for nvidia architecture. A more targeted search will yield better results.

 

[Rayden]

That's a good article. My partner and I decided to go with the latest SPARC because it is open source. We were unable to find enough technical papers on the architecture of any GPU's.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Personally, I'm wondering what the hell the Itanium is doing in a discussion of GPUs. 😛

- M4H

 

[Weatherton]

Here is a site from one of the teams in my processor architecture class last semester:


Nvidia GeForce 6800/7800
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rs5ea/geforce/

If you want to know more about any CPUs, here are the other links from the class (my group was the AMD Opteron ()

Intel Pentium M
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~eeo5w/pentiumm/

AMD Opteron
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~avw6s/opteron.html

IBM POWER5
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~elc5d/cs451/

Intel Itanium 1/2
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~ams3cf/itanium.htm

Tensilica Xtensa
http://xtensa.2uan.com/

Sony Cell
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mt2w/cell.html

Pentium 4
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~mc2zk/cs451/Pentium4.html

 

[Varun]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Personally, I'm wondering what the hell the Itanium is doing in a discussion of GPUs. 😛

- M4H

He gave an example of the type of paper he was looking for.

 

[Goi]

I think the actual workings of GPUs are different enough and are probably trade secret, which is why you don't see them discussed in detail.

 

[Rayden]

I was looking for the processor architecture. In my class we have thus far discussed the TI C6X000 series and the Itanium in detail, discussing things like functional units, registers, pipelining, software pipelining, etc. I was hoping that similar information on a GPU processor was available.

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: Goi
I think the actual workings of GPUs are different enough and are probably trade secret, which is why you don't see them discussed in detail.

I think this is the case. Probably only old architechtures have really detailed information on them. Plus, except for the pixel shaders, people don't program for the graphics cards at as a low a level as they do with CPUs so it's easier to keep this sort of info a secret.

 

[Goi]

It's easier for CPUs. There are tons of papers on CPU architectures, and besides, they're much more mature and everyone knows how a basic(or even an advanced) CPU works, even down to the nitty gritty details. There just isn't that much variation between CPU architectures within the past decade or so. They're basically all superpipelined, superscalar, out of order and speculative. The differences are just in number of units and resources, various algorithms, etc. Of course, there are still trade secrets. Nobody but intel knows what kinda branch predictor they're using for example.

 

[Rayden]

Not all cpu's are "super" pipelined... The P4 is of course with upwards of 20 pipelines, but other cpu's have as few as 7.

 

[Goi]

Well, by definition anything beyond the classic 5 stage RISC pipeline is "super" pipelined 🙂