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What happens when a GPU reads memory (blog.doubleword.ai)
yipinwong 2 hours ago [-]
This is a type of article that is HN worthy and came to HN for initially because I don't even understand a third of content there. Giving me inspiration to dive deeper.

SEriously, I don't understand it (yet) lol.

nazgulsenpai 1 hours ago [-]
That's the best feeling -- idly clicking through looking for that one rabbit hole to fall down then stumbling upon a gem like this. I noticed this the first time on copetti.org articles about game console architectures: know nothing, look every jargon or acronym up as you read along, end up with 42 tabs and a basic high-level understanding of the topic by the end.
empiricus 3 hours ago [-]
For a long time, the chip manufacturers had an inclination to simplify the hardware and rely on the software adapting and optimizing. But for decades this bid failed. Now we have the unrelenting AI capable of finetuning kernels relatively quickly. Maybe simpler hw will work this time? Note: not sure if TPU/NPU is not only simple but also too limited.
KellyCriterion 1 hours ago [-]
VERY good article, reminds me on:

"what every programmer should know about memory" https://github.com/Ty-Chen/Reading-List/blob/master/What%20e...

WalterGR 15 minutes ago [-]
That’s somebody’s highlighted copy of the PDF.

Here’s a clean version: https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf

snigacookie 1 hours ago [-]
Can someone help me understand why I spent 5 minutes reading something that I still don't understand?

Link for the ELI5 version?

mathisfun123 1 hours ago [-]
YMMV; not all GPUs work exactly like this
brcmthrowaway 2 hours ago [-]
Ctrl+F PCIe BAR.. nothing.
porridgeraisin 2 hours ago [-]
This is talking about HBM/GDDR
KK7NIL 2 hours ago [-]
a.k.a. VRAM
brcmthrowaway 2 hours ago [-]
Something needs to be transferred from sysmem right?
wmf 48 minutes ago [-]
That's probably PCIe DMA initiated by the GPU so I don't think BAR is used.
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