CUDA 4.0发布

CUDA Toolkit 4.0 RC (March 2011)

For older releases, see the CUDA Toolkit Release Archive

Release Highlights

Easier Application Porting

• Share GPUs across multiple threads
• Use all GPUs in the system concurrently from a single host thread
• No-copy pinning of system memory, a faster alternative to cudaMallocHost()
• C++ new/delete and support for virtual functions
• Support for inline PTX assembly
• Thrust library of templated performance primitives such as sort, reduce, etc.
• NVIDIA Performance Primitives (NPP) library for image/video processing
• Layered Textures for working with same size/format textures at larger sizes and higher performance

Faster Multi-GPU Programming

• Unified Virtual Addressing
• GPUDirect v2.0 support for Peer-to-Peer Communication

New & Improved Developer Tools

• Automated Performance Analysis in Visual Profiler
• C++ debugging in cuda-gdb
• GPU binary disassembler for Fermi architecture (cuobjdump)

Please refer to the Release Notes and Getting Started Guides for more information.

从特性上看，不是简单的硬件版本更新，而是对所有的显卡都有用的。

尤其值得称赞的是多卡之间可以通过pcie直接进行数据交换，很多应用就不会再受PCIE带宽的限制了。

利用PCIE的采集卡的设备，也可以在不久的将来直接通过PCIE直接跟GPU进行数据交互，不用再通过主内存传递数据，这是一个伟大的进步！

统一寻址地址：

GPUDirect V2.0新特性，可以直接通过PCIE之间传数据，而不是通过主内存做中转：

C++模板的支持

Nvidia的硬件在今年没有太多变化，但是CUDA4.0的出现，必然会对已有的硬件产生新的活力。

对于大数据传输的应用，很多都可以很好的支持了！