What is a Texture Processing Cluster?

A Texture Processing Cluster (TPC) is a pair of adjacent Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) .

Before the Blackwell SM architecture , TPCs were not mapped onto any level of the CUDA programming model 's memory hierarchy or thread hierarchy .

The fifth-generation Tensor Cores in the Blackwell SM architecture added the "CTA pair" level of the Parallel Thread eXecution (PTX) thread hierarchy , which maps onto TPCs. Many tcgen05 PTX instructions include a .cta_group field that can use a single SM (.cta_group::1) or a pair of SMs in a TPC (::2), which are mapped to 1SM and 2SM variants of Streaming Assembler (SASS) instructions like MMA.