General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (hardware)

GPGPUs are GPUs capable of running General-purpose programs. The extent to which "general-purpose" is defined as being "general" varies considerably: varying from Microprocessor-grade to fully capable of running Operating Systems such as GNU/Linux. Examples of the former have instruction subsets similar to the 8086: MIAOW had bit manipulation, bitwise operations, Vector floating-point and branch.^[1] whereas Larrabee was capable of running a full Linux OS.^[2]

List of GPGPUs

Larrabee

For Larrabee, Tom Forsyth^[3] relates that it was capable of running a full Linux Operating System.^[4] The only specialist hardware (fixed-function) was texture sampling units.^[5] Larrabee is notable in that it became AVX512.^[6]

RISC-V

Two RISC-V efforts in development include a GPGPU from Esperanto^[7]^[8] and a consortium led by Atif Zazar to leverage RISC-V.^[9]^[10]^[11] Esperanto offers a "direct" SDK to program individual cores, including the "accompanying vector/tensor unit" of each.^[12]

Nyuzi

Nyuzi is a general-purpose processor with SIMD units.^[13] A custom port of LLVM was developed.^[14]

MIAOW

MIAOW implemented a subset of Southern Islands^[15]^[16]

Vortex GPU

Vortex GPU implemented RISC-V RV32IMAF and RV64IMAFD (a General-Purpose CPU) and "bolted on" a SIMT execution engine with a minimal RISC-V ISA Extension.^[17] Vortex GPU followed the same architecture as Larrabee by only providing specialist texture sampling hardware due to FPGA size limitations.^[18]

References

[1] ttps://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~vinay/pubs/MIAOW-coolchips-paper.pdf

[2] ttps://vimeo.com/450406346

[3] ttps://tomforsyth1000.github.io/larrabee/larrabee.html

[4] ttps://vimeo.com/450406346

[5] ttps://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.gatech.edu/dist/e/466/files/2008/12/Larrabee_ECE4893.pdf

[6] ttps://tomforsyth1000.github.io/larrabee/larrabee.html

[7] "Esperanto exits stealth mode, aims at AI with a 4,096 core 7nm RISC-V monster". wikichip.org. January 2018. Retrieved 2 January 2018.

[8] "Esperanto ET-SoC-1 1092 RISC-V AI Accelerator Solution at Hot Chips 33". 24 August 2021.

[9] ttps://web.archive.org/web/20240918204134/https://nextgengpu.tech.blog/

[10] ttps://www.eetimes.com/rv64x-a-free-open-source-gpu-for-risc-v/

[11] ttps://github.com/Y-BoBo/RV32I-GPU

[12] ttps://www.esperanto.ai/News/esperanto-technologies-launches-general-purpose-sdk/

[13] ttps://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor/wiki/Microarchitecture

[14] ttps://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor/wiki/Compiler-ABI

[15] ttps://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~vinay/pubs/MIAOW_Architecture_Whitepaper.pdf

[16] ttps://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/radeon-tech-docs/instruction-set-architectures/southern-islands-instruction-set-architecture.pdf

[17] ttps://github.com/vortexgpgpu/vortex

[18] ttps://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10857

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v t e Hardware acceleration
Theory	Universal Turing machine Parallel computing Distributed computing
Applications	GPU GPGPU software DirectX Audio Digital signal processing Hardware random number generation Neural processing unit Cryptography TLS Machine vision Custom hardware attack scrypt Networking Data
Implementations	High-level synthesis C to HDL FPGA ASIC CPLD System on a chip Network on a chip
Architectures	Dataflow Transport triggered Multicore Manycore Heterogeneous In-memory computing Systolic array Neuromorphic
Related	Programmable logic Processor design chronology Digital electronics Virtualization Hardware emulation Logic synthesis Embedded systems