There is lots of literature on instruction pipelines in CPUs, but GPUs remain poorly understood. GPUs execute instructions in a wildly different manner, and many common compiler transformations that are effective for CPUs – such as strength reduction, or partial dead code elimination – can actually hurt GPU performance. Through the lens of NVidia’s latest series of GPUs, let’s take a look at how instructions are actually executed and how that affects us as programmers and compiler developers.

For Christmas, I received a Google Home and some Philips Hue lightbulbs. Within 15 minutes, I had every light in my apartment responding to voice controls! Naturally rather than accepting that life is awesome and that I live in the future, I was immediately annoyed that I still had to use a remote to change inputs on my TV. Here’s how I went about fixing that.