Evolution of the NVIDIA GPU Architecture

Warp Shuffle Instructions∗ In Fermi, data could only be exchanged between threads using sharedmemory.∗ Resulted in additional synchronization time∗ Kepler allows the shuffle functions, which∗ Exchange data between threads without using shared memory∗ Handles the store‐and‐load operation as a single step∗ Data can only be shared within the same warp∗ In their example, an FFT algorithm saw 6% performance increase whenusing this instruction.18