The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture Nvidia（GeForce 6系列Nvidia GPU体系结构）.pdf

Chapter 30 The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture Emmett Kilgariff NVIDIA Corporation Randima Fernando NVIDIA Corporation The previous chapter described how GPU architecture has changed as a result of compu- tational and communications trends in microprocessing. This chapter describes the archi- tecture of the GeForce 6 Series GPUs from NVIDIA, which owe their formidable computational power to their ability to take advantage of these trends. Most notably, we focus on the GeForce 6800 (NVIDIA’s flagship GPU at the time of writing, shown in Figure 30-1), which delivers hundreds of gigaflops of single-precision floating-point com- putation, as compared to approximately 12 gigaflops for current high-end CPUs. In this chapter—and throughout the book—references to GeForce 6 Series GPUs should be read to include the latest Quadro FX GPUs supporting Shader Model 3.0, which provide a superset of the functionality offered by the GeForce 6 Series. We start with a general overview of where the GPU fits into the overall computer system, and then we describe the architecture along with details of specific features and performance characteristics. 30.1 How the GPU Fits into the Overall Computer System The CPU in a modern computer system communicates with the GPU through a graph- ics connector such as a PCI Express or AGP slot on the motherboard. Because the graphics connector is responsible for transferring all command, texture, and vertex data from the CPU to the GPU, the bus technology has evolved alongside GPUs over the past few years. The original AGP slot ran at 66 MHz and was 32 bits wide, giving a transfer rate of 264 MB/sec. AGP 2 ×, 4×, and 8× followed, each doubling the available