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To ones who are interested: "Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach" is a great book to learn CUDA programming, and it talks mostly about performance because, after all, GPU is about speed.

Unlike normal programming books, it talks a lot about how GPUs work and how the introduced techniques fit in that picture. It's interesting even if you are just curious how a (NVIDIA) GPU works at code-level. Strongly recommended.

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I bought the first edition when it came out, and definitely it was a gold mine of information on the subject. I wonder though, is the fourth edition worth buying another copy? Nvidia has been advancing CUDA, in particular moving more towards C++ in the kernel language. But none of that was present when this book came out in 2007. Now more and more stuff is happening at thread block level with the cooperative group C++ API and warp level for tensor cores. It would be great if the authors revisited all the early chapters to modernize that content, but that's a lot of work so I don't usually count on authors making such an effort for later editions.

I also read the older edition and got the 4th for the second read recently. I felt that the updated coverage is more on the GPU side than the language side. It covers new GPU features and architectures well. I don't think it covers Tensor core things. But I might be wrong.

So it's worth the update if you're interested in general NVIDIA GPU evolution.

Ah thanks! That's good to know.

There are also video lectures which are almost 1-1 mapping of the book

Programming Massively Parallel Processors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pkbXmE4POc&list=PLRRuQYjFhp...

I have the book but didn't know about these, thanks for the link!

> it talks a lot about how GPUs work

it's true - out of all of the "LEARN CUDA IN 24 HOURS" books, this is the best one. indeed this isn't one of those same books - this is a textbook - but at first glance it resembles them (at least the color scheme and the title led me astray when i first found it).

How does it compare to the docs from Nvidia, which always struck me as fairly comprehensive?

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