Computer Science Colloquium Talk by AMD Engineers!
One Thread...? Thousands! An Introduction to Modern GPUs
| Date: | 10/20/2025, 2:15 PM |
| Category: | Kolloquium |
| Speaker: | Fabian Wildgrube, Pirmin Pfeifer |
Games Engineering Alumnus Pirmin Pfeifer and Fabian Wildgrube both Software Development Engineers at AMD will give an exciting invited talk about GPU cores--from a hardware and software perspective. Everyone interested is warmly invited!
Join us for an amazing talk by Pirmin and Fabian diving deeply into state-of-the-art Graphics Processing Units!
When: 20.10. at 2:15pm
Where: Hubland (South), Building Z6, Room number 1.012
Abstract
Most of us have started their journey into software engineering with high-level, single-threaded languages and a mental model of a singular CPU. However, we quickly learned that modern CPUs actually run multiple threads in parallel. As applications process more and more data (think, e.g., databases) making use of the processing power available becomes ever more important. However, for certain workloads, such as creating 3-D worlds or crunching matrix after matrix in an LLM, even the many cores (and threads) available in modern CPUs aren't nearly enough — and everybody has probably heard that graphics cards (GPUs) are the solution with "thousands of cores" and "incredible performance".
In this talk we will explore what these thousands of "cores" look like under the hood, why they aren't the same as CPU cores and especially what kind of software engineering challenges arise from having to deal with and program for what is effectively a distributed system within your computer. We'll cover the hardware architecture of modern GPUs, traditional approaches for programming them, and introduce a novel programming paradigm that we work on here at AMD.
Vitae
Fabian Wildgrube, Sr. Software Development Engineer
• Joined AMD in 2022
• Works on: Use-case research HPC, API evolution, Prototyping
• Background: from frontend to embedded to graphics
• Worked for: University of Augsburg, Freelance, Zeiss
Mail: Fabian.Wildgrube@amd.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabian-wildgrube-847390226/
Pirmin Pfeifer, Software Development Engineer
• Joined AMD in 2022
• Works on: Raytracing Acceleration Structures, GPU Autonomy Research
• Background: graphics, algorithms and raytracing
• Worked for: University of Würzburg, DHBW Bad Mergendheim, BII
Mail: Pirmin.Pfeifer@amd.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pirmin-pfeifer/
