Re:AMD Killed the Itanium
by cwzwarich on Saturday February 04, 2023 @09:41AM
(#34654825)
> GPUs today have a more VLIW-like architecture than CPUs
Older GPUs seemed more VLIW-like because they were descended from fixed-function rendering pipelines and essentially just exposed the control signals via instruction encodings. Over time, shader cores have become less VLIW-like, e.g. look at any reverse engineering of recent Nvidia architectures.
This makes sense for the same reason you give for SMT: if you're trying to execute from multiple instruction streams on the same execution units, it makes more sense to use small individual instructions rather than large puzzle pieces.
Older GPUs seemed more VLIW-like because they were descended from fixed-function rendering pipelines and essentially just exposed the control signals via instruction encodings. Over time, shader cores have become less VLIW-like, e.g. look at any reverse engineering of recent Nvidia architectures.
This makes sense for the same reason you give for SMT: if you're trying to execute from multiple instruction streams on the same execution units, it makes more sense to use small individual instructions rather than large puzzle pieces.