- Jan 1, 2011
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I just wanted to get this cleared up. The term Nvidia uses to call the shaders in its GPUS is "CUDA Core". This can be seen on their official GTX 680 specifications page, and is clearly an Nvidia only term since CUDA is also the name of their proprietary GPGPU software.
AMD, on the other hand, uses the term "Stream Processor". This can also be seen on the official 7970 GHz Edition specifications page. Now, I've seen some people refer to the shader units on Nvidia graphics chips as "stream processors", but this is erroneous. Just like "CUDA Core" "Stream Processor" is an AMD-invented term. It also derives from their proprietary GPGPU software, which used to be called ATI Stream but is now just called AMD App Acceleration. It's a little easier to mix up "Stream Processor" with Nvidia since "Stream" is not an AMD invented acronym (and since ATI Stream was considerably less successful than CUDA...).
So, with that cleared up, am I correct in saying that the general term for the main units in a GPU is "shaders" or "shader units"?
AMD, on the other hand, uses the term "Stream Processor". This can also be seen on the official 7970 GHz Edition specifications page. Now, I've seen some people refer to the shader units on Nvidia graphics chips as "stream processors", but this is erroneous. Just like "CUDA Core" "Stream Processor" is an AMD-invented term. It also derives from their proprietary GPGPU software, which used to be called ATI Stream but is now just called AMD App Acceleration. It's a little easier to mix up "Stream Processor" with Nvidia since "Stream" is not an AMD invented acronym (and since ATI Stream was considerably less successful than CUDA...).
So, with that cleared up, am I correct in saying that the general term for the main units in a GPU is "shaders" or "shader units"?