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CUDA Academy · Lesson

Compute-Bound vs Memory-Bound

Reading the roofline to plan fixes.

Two Kinds of Limit

Every kernel hits one of two walls. It is either compute-bound, limited by math, or memory-bound, limited by data movement. ⚖️

Compute-Bound, Defined

A compute-bound kernel keeps the math units busy and rarely waits on memory. Its limit is raw arithmetic throughput.

All lessons in this course

  1. Timeline View in Nsight Systems
  2. Kernel Metrics in Nsight Compute
  3. Compute-Bound vs Memory-Bound
  4. Annotating Code with NVTX
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