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cudacuda-uva

In CUDA, does UVA depend on any hardware features?

I know CUDA only got UVA (Unified Virtual Addressing) with version 4.0. But - is that only a software feature? Or does it require some kind of hardware support (on the GPU side I mean)?

Notes:

  • In this GTC 2011 presentation it says a Fermi-class GPU is necessary for P2P copies, but it doesn't say that's necessary for UVA itself.
  • Note: I know UVA is not a good idea on a 32-bit-CPU system, I don't mean that kind of hardware support.
Solution

  • The UVA which was introduced back in May 2011 with CUDA 4.0 requires for hardware support some Fermi-class GPUs. So, this implies compute capability 2.0 onwards.

    But apparently, that's not enough since, according to slide #17 of this presentation of the new features of CUDA 4.0, it seems to be only supported in 64-bit (which makes sense since otherwise you would run out of address space pretty quick), and with TCC (Tesla Compute Cluster) when on Windows. I'm not sure if this later limitation still exists since I never ever developed on Windows.