Take a virtual tour inside the NVIDIA GA102 graphics processing unit to explore the architecture that enables it to perform over 35 trillion calculations per second.

Findings

Additional insights we found via Branch Education

The GPU contains 28.3 billion transistors—electronic switches that can code for 1 or 0 in computer code—with most of its area devoted to processing cores organized into clusters.
Each cluster contains 12 streaming multiprocessors, each composed of a ray-tracing core that runs algorithms related to shadows, reflections, and other light-related physics, and four warps comprising 32 CUDA cores and one tensor core.
Each streaming multiprocessor also contains four special-function units that handle less common mathematical operations, such as square roots.
CUDA cores, each possessing about 410,000 transistors, can be thought of as calculators that perform addition, multiplication, and other basic arithmetic operations on binary-coded numbers—the most common computations when running video games.
Tensor cores, which are most useful for geometric transformations, neural networks, and AI-related computations, perform computations on arrays of numbers called matrices.
The GA102's cores are supported by memory caches, memory controllers that manage data between the GPU and memory, a gigathread engine that coordinates processing across the chip, and interface components, such as the PCIe interface, which connects the chip to the surrounding motherboard.