Survey on Stream Processors and Graphics Processing Units

Architectures for parallel computing are becoming all the more essential with the increasing demands of multimedia, scientific, and engineering applications. These applications require architectures which can scale to meet their real-time constraints, with all current technology limitations in mind such as the memory gap, and power wall. While current many-core CPU architectures show an increase in performance, they still cannot achieve the necessary real-time performance required by today`s applications as they fail to efficiently utilize a large number of ALUs. New programming models, computer architecture innovations, coupled with advancements in process technology have set the foundations for the development of the next generation of supercomputers for high-performance computing (HPC). At the center of these emerging architectures are Stream Processors and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Over the years GPUs exhibited increased programmability that has made it possible to harvest their computational power for non graphics applications, while stream processors because of their programming model and novel design have managed to utilize a large number of ALUs to provide increased performance. The objective of this survey paper is to provide an overview of the architecture, organization, and fundamental concepts of stream processors and Graphics Processing Units.