What type of instructions does each pipeline execute?

Developer Tools Nsight Compute
1

nsight-compute-cli exposes the following metrics regarding instruction mix “smsp__inst_executed_pipe_XX” where XX are:

  • alu

  • fma

  • adu

  • cbu

  • ipa

  • uniform

…

Question : I am wondering what each of these pipeline unit abbreviations means.

I figured “alu” means arithmetic & logic unit for integer and logic operations? “fma” is fused multiply add for floating point operations? However, I ran a tiny kernel that is supposed to only involve integer/logic and memory operations (I double checked the ptx and confirmed this). However, the instruction count for fma is non-zero for such a kernel.

And for the other pipelines I simply can’t guess what they are.

Any explanation is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

2

I have exactly the same questions. And I have been searching online to find documentations for those acronym, so far no luck.

3

CBU should be control branch unit?
I’m also curious about what ADU/Uniform/XU means.