Stefan Mileschin

Kicking off next week will be the annual International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, better known as SC. For NVIDIA, next to their annual GPU Technology Conference, SC is their second biggest GPU compute conference, and is typically the venue for NVIDIA’s summer/fall announcements. To that end NVIDIA has a number of announcements lined up for this year, so many in fact that they’re pushing out some of them ahead of the conference just to keep them from being overwhelming. The most important of those announcements in turn will be the announcement of the next version of CUDA, CUDA 6.

Unlike some prior CUDA releases, NVIDIA isn’t touting a large number of new features for this version of CUDA. But what few elements NVIDIA is working on are going to be very significant.

The big news here – and the headlining feature for CUDA 6 – is that NVIDIA has implemented complete unified memory support within CUDA. The toolkit has possessed unified virtual addressing support since CUDA 4, allowing the disparate x86 and GPU memory pools to be addressed together in a single space. But unified virtual addressing only simplified memory management; it did not get rid of the required explicit memory copying and pinning operations necessary to bring over data to the GPU first before the GPU could work on it.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7515/n...emory-for-cuda