What does GPU assembly look like? I have played around with CPU assembly programming like Nasm, Tasm or Masm, but I'm really curious to know how GPU works now.
However, i'm quite confused when I look on internet. I've heard about Cuda and OpenCL, but it is not what I'm looking for.
I'd like to know how GPUs instructions are in RAM... What are the Nasm and Masm for most GPUs? What is the x86 or Z80 of GPUs (What are the different families of GPU)? Do you know a constructor opcodes reference manual?
I think I really need something to compare between the two Processing Units to make it clear, because GPU assembly programming seems to be an even harder subject to learn from on internet that CPU asm programming. I've also read that &quot;NVIDIA never released details on the instructions actually understood by their hardware&quot;, but it seems pretty surprising to me. Full post there: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4660974/how-to-create-or-manipulate-gpu-assembler?newreg=e31519279ce949f087df6322dbf2bf4d
Thanks for your help!
You're tilting at windmills trying to learn "GPU assembly", and it's due to the differences between how CPUs and GPUs are made and sold.

Each CPU has what's called an instruction set architecture, for example x86 or ARMv8. The instruction set is the interface between the user of the CPU (i.e. the programmer) and the chip. The chip designer publishes the details of the instruction set so that compiler vendors can write compilers to target that instruction set. Any CPU that uses that instruction set can run the same binaries. (Extensions like SSE make that slightly untrue, but they only add new instructions: they don't change the structure of the binary.) When the vendor creates a new processor family, it could have completely different micro-architecture internally, but the same instruction set.

GPUs are not like this at all. For best efficiency, the instruction set is usually closely tied to the micro-architecture of the CPU. That means each new family of GPUs has a new instruction set. GPUs can't run binaries made for different GPUs. For this reason, the instruction set usually isn't published: instead, your interface to the GPU is the driver published by the vendor for each graphics API (OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX, &amp;c.). This is why the graphics APIs have functions to take the source code of a shader and run it: the compiled shader only runs on the same model or family of GPU it was compiled for.

The closest you get to GPU assembly language is SPIR-V. This is an industry-standard intermediate representation, which GPU vendors are starting to support. It's like a GPU equivalent of LLVM's intermediate representation. It allows you to do the parsing and source optimization parts of compilation up-front to get a SPIR-V file, and then the GPU driver only needs to compile that to the GPU's instruction set at load time.