Why is GPU Memory Important for your Software?

GPU memory is the on-chip memory that Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have access to for temporary data buffer storage. This information is useful for operations on complex mathematical, graphic, and visual data. Before executing instructions, a GPU device frequently has to keep massive data volumes in its own memory area.

If GPU memory resources are insufficient, the system may experience performance bottlenecks or pointless delays while it transfers small data packets from the CPU/global memory to GPU memory.

A dedicated memory area, distinct from the system’s RAM, is called GPU memory. The on-chip memory in GPUs plays a significant role in temporarily storing and accessing data and processes, just like it does in all computation systems.

However, when working with enormously demanding workloads like AI/ML models, these intermittent storage requirements are frequently disregarded. It turns out that the most underappreciated aspects of GPU resource consumption are memory usage and memory bandwidth.

The varieties of GPU memory and the distinctions between CPU and GPU memory will be covered in this article. We’ll also discuss how different applications are impacted by the availability of GPU memory and why machine learning applications require high memory bandwidth.

What is the Significance of GPU memory?

GPU memory, also known as Video Random Access Memory (VRAM), enables the GPU to process challenging resource-intensive operations and quickly reference large datasets without taxing the system’s RAM and decelerating performance.

VRAM is well known for its ability to handle high-bandwidth, data-intensive tasks including blockchain calculations, video playback, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), gaming, and 3D rendering. Computing systems may experience crippling performance issues due to insufficient VRAM memory bandwidth.

The crucial significance that memory resources will continue to play in sustaining computing workloads across industries is demonstrated by the enormous market growth.

When choosing GPU resources for deployment, businesses wishing to speed Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Image Processing, Deep Neural Networks, or other resource-intensive tasks must take memory bandwidth into serious consideration. Along with GPU cores and the potential for dynamic partitioning, on-chip memory must taken into account as a fundamental consideration.

What are the different types of GPUs?

The importance of memory as a technology has never changed, allowing for constant improvements across a range of computing fields. Effective memory use continues to be a deal-breaker across the board, whether we’re talking about Big Data analytics, AI/ML/IoT-based industrial technology, or consumer-grade devices like potent smartphones.

The GPU is connected to a variety of memory types. These types are-

1. Register Memory: Operands stored in quick on-chip memory for use by GPU threads. Only the threads have access to this memory, which is the quickest one a GPU has. It has a thread’s lifespan.
2. Shared Memory: When the GPU’s VRAM supply gets low, this memory type used. Within a GPU block, several threads conduct resource-intensive activities while sharing these CUDA memory regions. The lifetime of shared memory is determined by the block in which it was established.
3. Local Memory: GPU static memory can also assigned by the OS kernel. Such memory is local to the operation and is only accessible by the thread to which it assigned, in accordance with the CUDA programming paradigm. In comparison to shared memory or registers, it is considerably slower.

CPU Memory vs GPU Memory: A comparative analysis

Both the Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) utilize memory resources to achieve their tasks and effectively fetch data for computation.

The CPU is the soul of every computer. It sets the foundation and sets an effective work system. The CPU generalized processing unit that known to handle the operating system and common tasks for example firewalls and web access. Hence, the memory used is also a generalized one (System RAM).

GPUs specialized hardware that can conduct demanding, sophisticated computations. As a result, its many processing cores have access to dedicated VRAM to conduct repeated calculations that are the same.

Here are points why CPU and GPU memory are different from each other:

For processing complex procedures, companies adjust CPU cores. To carry out complicated tasks serially, the data passes through a sequence of L1, L2, and L3 caches before entering RAM. However, GPU cores are less potent and intended for simple tasks only.

However, the GPU uses data read from memory and parallel computation to perform sophisticated operations. The GPU memory has a larger bandwidth, which allows it to handle data at a considerably higher volume.

How does GPU Memory’s bandwidth impact the workloads?

With the help of memory bandwidth in the GPU, we can determine how fast it can transfer data to and from between processing cores and memory. We can estimate this by data transmission speed between memory cores and computation cores or via the number of links or in the form of buses connecting these two parts.

When it comes to GPU, Memory bandwidth impacts various tasks. It sometimes hampers computational productivity or running applications of healthcare or gaming.

• Effective Productivity: Engineering jobs completed with the aid of programs like AutoCAD and Autodesk 3ds Max necessitate strong systems to manage model development and design processing. A GPU with additional memory can store and analyze a bigger data cluster. Additionally, it will process the stored data more quickly the better the memory bandwidth.
• Streamlines Gaming: Online game hosting cloud servers require strong GPUs that operate without lag. The GPU memory and its bandwidth, in addition to elements like the CPU and RAM, are crucial to the entire functionality and visual presentation of online games. GPU resources have an impact on gaming because they directly express what you see on the screen.
• Automatic Industry: The automotive industry is creating driverless vehicles that can gather real-time photos from various angles. These autonomous vehicles pick up on various real-world situations and adjust to them. These systems need powerful processing abilities supported by enormous memory resources and memory bandwidth to manage such multidirectional video data flows in order to handle such unparalleled image recognition potential.
• Healthcare & Life Science Systems: Medical systems require GPU resources with sufficient memory bandwidth for properly creating and managing medical images from various healthcare equipment. These systems can quickly analyze medical record data to provide more insightful analyses.

Conclusion

GPU is quite important for your servers. It simply helps you in dealing with resource-intensive tasks and dedicates efficiency to your work. Factors like this play a significant role in memory bandwidth and might also affect the productivity of your server. With the help of GPU, you can enhance the quality of image and video-based ML projects such as image recognition and object identification and help in processing workloads.