Stream processing

As a stream processor is called while a small scalar processing unit which may occur in such coprocessors a special type of the coprocessor.

Stream processor and coprocessor

A stream processor, a coprocessor will be referred to, can process the data streams (English stream). The processing is characterized above all by high parallelization. Many applications come from the area of high performance computing ( HPC).

Historical Development and interesting stream processors

As a Stream Processor ATI had (now acquired by AMD) initially presented a part of the X1x00 series. This was to graphics cards that have been displaced by adjusting the driver in a position not only to render graphics, but also to process other data streams. AMD calls this type of data processing " stream computing ". Nvidia presented in turn with the introduction of its unified shader architecture for video cards and GPUs, which can be used as a stream processor. Nvidia marketed under the term " CUDA " ( Compute Unified Device Architecture ). AMD presented in turn also a unified shader architecture. Because the Unified shaders are much more flexible in programming than the previous rendering pipelines, these graphics processors are particularly well suited for the processing of various data streams, ie for the use of stream processors.

Stream processors as a (small ) scalar arithmetic units

Scalar arithmetic units that can perform single scalar arithmetic operations on a data stream called stream processors or stream processing units (English: Stream Processing Units). A group of such small stream processors or scalar arithmetic units can be found in the graphics processors / stream processors are based on the unified shader architecture. The combination of scalar arithmetic units not only processing of scalar operations but also vector processing is possible.