2 docs tagged with "sm"

A spec sheet lists a GPU as a pile of numbers — core count, clock speed, memory bandwidth — but those numbers only make sense once you know what physical structure they're describing. A GPU is not a bag of independent processors; it's a small number of large, warp-scheduling processors (streaming multiprocessors), each built from smaller replicated pieces, all sharing a common path out to memory. Understanding that structure top to bottom is what turns a spec sheet from marketing copy into something you can reason about.

The SM is the unit everything about GPU performance is ultimately accounted against: occupancy, register pressure, shared-memory capacity, and warp scheduling are all per-SM quantities. Zooming into one SM explains why a block, once scheduled, stays resident on a single SM for its entire lifetime, and why the resources that limit how many blocks can run concurrently are the ones this page enumerates.