What is a GPU Core?

The cores are the primary compute units that make up the Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) .

Examples of GPU core types include CUDA Cores and Tensor Cores .

Though GPU cores are comparable to CPU cores in that they are the component that effects actual computations, this analogy can be quite misleading. Instead, it is perhaps more helpful to take the viewpoint of the quantitative computer architect and think of them as "pipes" into which data goes in and out of which transformed data is returned. These pipes are associated in turn with specific instructions from the hardware's perspective and with different fundamental affordances of throughput from the programmers' (e.g. floating point matrix multiplication arithmetic throughput in the case of the Tensor Cores ).

The SMs are closer to being the equivalent of CPU cores, in that they have register memory to store information, cores to transform it, and an instruction scheduler to specify and command transformations.