GPUs and Accelerators

Yet another stolen image from Randal Munroe

GPUs

Reading (154B)

Computer Organization and Design

Section 6.6

Reading (201A)

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach

Section 4.4

GPUs are one of the most pervasive accelerators. Not only do all of your computers have a GPU, but even our phones have GPUs. In fact, GPUs are usually one of the largest components on our processors!

So, let’s learn a bit about how GPUs work.

Other accelerators

Next, let’s talk about some other accelerators. In this video, I talk about the TPU or tensor processor unit which is a completely novel architecture design from Google and other new architectures. I talk some about the “roofline” model. However, we haven’t covered that this quarter. If you want to find out more about the roofline model, it’s described in Section 6.10 of the book.

Up next… ECS201C the graduate computer architecture course!.

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