• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.10-21
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• 2012

The role of GPU has evolved from graphics-specific processing to general-purpose processing with the development of unified shader core architecture. Especially, execution methods for general-purpose parallel applications using GPU have been researched intensively, since the parallel hardware architecture can be utilized efficiently when the parallel applications are executed. However, current GPU architecture has limitations in executing general-purpose parallel applications, since the GPU is not specialized for general-purpose computing yet. To improve the GPU performance when general-purpose parallel applications are executed, the GPU architecture should be evolved. In this work, we analyze the GPU performance according to the architecture varying the number of cores and clock frequency. Our simulation results show that the GPU performance improves by up to 125.8% and 16.2% as the number of cores increases and the clock frequency increases, respectively. However, note that the improvement of the GPU performance is saturated even though the number of cores increases and the clock frequency increases continuously, since the data cannot be provided to the GPU due to the limit of memory bandwidth. Consequently, to accomplish high performance effectiveness on GPU, computational resources must be more suitably considered.