GPU Design · All levels

GPU Glossary

Shared vocabulary across SIMT programming, graphics pipeline, and GPU silicon implementation.

Terms to use precisely

SIMT: single instruction stream with per-lane masking and reconvergence behavior.
Warp/Wavefront: hardware scheduling unit grouping multiple lanes.
Occupancy: resident warps/blocks relative to SM resource limits.
Coalescing: merging lane memory requests into fewer aligned transactions.
SM: streaming multiprocessor containing schedulers, register files, and execution units.
Early-Z: depth/stencil culling before expensive fragment shading.
TBDR: tile-based deferred rendering to increase on-chip reuse.
Roofline: model for compute-vs-memory bottleneck classification.