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Re: [gomp-nvptx 2/9] nvptx backend: new "uniform SIMT" codegen variant


On Wed, 2 Dec 2015, Nathan Sidwell wrote:

> On 12/02/15 05:40, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> > Don't know the HW good enough, is there any power consumption, heat etc.
> > difference between the two approaches?  I mean does the HW consume different
> > amount of power if only one thread in a warp executes code and the other
> > threads in the same warp just jump around it, vs. having all threads busy?
> 
> Having all threads busy will increase power consumption. >

Is that from general principles (i.e. "if it doesn't increase power
consumption, the GPU is poorly optimized"), or is that based on specific
knowledge on how existing GPUs operate (presumably reverse-engineered or
privately communicated -- I've never seen any public statements on this
point)?

The only certain case I imagine is instructions that go to SFU rather than
normal SPs -- but those are relatively rare.

> It's also bad if the other vectors are executing memory access instructions.

How so?  The memory accesses are the same independent of whether you reading
the same data from 1 thread or 32 synchronous threads.

Alexander


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