The article details the hardware-level journey of a GPU global load instruction on an RTX 4090, tracing how an LDG.E instruction fetches data from global memory through address translation, cache, L2 slices, and DRAM. The analysis is performed via reverse engineering using timing experiments due to limited NVIDIA documentation. The goal is improving performance through deep understanding of GPU memory access paths.
Background
GPU memory hierarchy optimization is critical for high-performance computing and ML workloads. NVIDIA's RTX 4090 is based on the Ada Lovelace architecture with 36 L2 cache slices.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Aug 27, 2026 at 10:42 PM
- Score
- 7.0 / 10