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jacobaustin123

16 karma · joined August 20, 2025

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jacobaustin123··on How to Think About GPUs
Thank you for taking the time to write this reply. Agree with "in the previous part of this series" comment. I'll try to find a way to highlight this more.

What I'd like to add to this page is some sort of highly clear glossary that defines all the terms at the top (but in some kind of collapsable fashion) so I can define everything with full clarity without disrupting the flow. I'll play with the HTML and see what I can do.

jacobaustin123··on How to Think About GPUs
I believe this is correct. For an H100, the 4 NVLink switches each have 64 ports supporting 25GB/s each, and each GPU uses a total of 18 ports. This gives us 450GB/s bandwidth within the node. But once you start trying to leave the node, you're limited by the per-node InfiniBand cabling, which only gives you 400GB/s out of the entire node (50GB / GPU).
jacobaustin123··on How to Think About GPUs
Shamelessly responding as the author. I (mostly) agree with you here.

> please be surgically precise with your terms

There's always a tension between precision in every explanation and the "moral" truth. I can say "a SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) vector unit like the TPU VPU with 32 ALUs (SIMD lanes) which NVIDIA calls CUDA Cores", which starts to get unwieldy and even then leaves terms like vector units undefined. I try to use footnotes liberally, but you have to believe the reader will click on them. Sidenotes are great, but hard to make work in HTML.

For terms like MXU, I was intending this to be a continuation of the previous several chapters which do define the term, but I agree it's maybe not reasonable to assume people will read each chapter.

There are other imprecisions here, like the term "Warp Scheduler" is itself overloaded to mean the scheduler, dispatch unit, and SIMD ALUs, which is kind of wrong but also morally true, since NVIDIA doesn't have a name for the combined unit. :shrug:

I agree with your points and will try to improve this more. It's just a hard set of compromises.