Driven by the insatiable market demand for real-time, high-definition 3D graphics, the
programmable GPU has evolved into a highly parallel, multithreaded, many-core processor
with tremendous computational horsepower and very high memory bandwidth. The GPU is
especially well-suited to address problems that can be expressed as data-parallel
computations – the same program is executed on many data elements in parallel – with high
arithmetic intensity – the ratio of arithmetic operations to memory operations. Because the
same program is executed for each data element, there is a lower requirement for
sophisticated flow control; and because it is executed on many data elements and has high
arithmetic intensity, the memory access latency can be hidden with calculations instead of big
data caches.