AMDGPU Glossary

Here you can find some generic acronyms used in the amdgpu driver. Notice that we have a dedicated glossary for Display Core at ‘DC Glossary’.

active_cu_number

The number of CUs that are active on the system. The number of active CUs may be less than SE * SH * CU depending on the board configuration.

CE

Constant Engine

CP

Command Processor

CPLIB

Content Protection Library

CU

Compute Unit

DFS

Digital Frequency Synthesizer

ECP

Enhanced Content Protection

EOP

End Of Pipe/Pipeline

GART

Graphics Address Remapping Table. This is the name we use for the GPUVM page table used by the GPU kernel driver. It remaps system resources (memory or MMIO space) into the GPU’s address space so the GPU can access them. The name GART harkens back to the days of AGP when the platform provided an MMU that the GPU could use to get a contiguous view of scattered pages for DMA. The MMU has since moved on to the GPU, but the name stuck.

GC

Graphics and Compute

GMC

Graphic Memory Controller

GPUVM

GPU Virtual Memory. This is the GPU’s MMU. The GPU supports multiple virtual address spaces that can be in flight at any given time. These allow the GPU to remap VRAM and system resources into GPU virtual address spaces for use by the GPU kernel driver and applications using the GPU. These provide memory protection for different applications using the GPU.

GTT

Graphics Translation Tables. This is a memory pool managed through TTM which provides access to system resources (memory or MMIO space) for use by the GPU. These addresses can be mapped into the “GART” GPUVM page table for use by the kernel driver or into per process GPUVM page tables for application usage.

IH

Interrupt Handler

HQD

Hardware Queue Descriptor

IB

Indirect Buffer

IMU

Integrated Management Unit (Power Management support)

IP

Intellectual Property blocks

KCQ

Kernel Compute Queue

KGQ

Kernel Graphics Queue

KIQ

Kernel Interface Queue

MC

Memory Controller

ME

MicroEngine (Graphics)

MEC

MicroEngine Compute

MES

MicroEngine Scheduler

MMHUB

Multi-Media HUB

MQD

Memory Queue Descriptor

PFP

Pre-Fetch Parser (Graphics)

PPLib

PowerPlay Library - PowerPlay is the power management component.

PSP

Platform Security Processor

RLC

RunList Controller. This name is a remnant of past ages and doesn’t have much meaning today. It’s a group of general-purpose helper engines for the GFX block. It’s involved in GFX power management and SR-IOV, among other things.

SDMA

System DMA

SE

Shader Engine

SH

SHader array

SMU/SMC

System Management Unit / System Management Controller

SRLC

Save/Restore List Control

SRLG

Save/Restore List GPM_MEM

SRLS

Save/Restore List SRM_MEM

SS

Spread Spectrum

TA

Trusted Application

TOC

Table of Contents

UVD

Unified Video Decoder

VCE

Video Compression Engine

VCN

Video Codec Next

VPE

Video Processing Engine