Various common acronyms are used for GPU components and shaders.
| Acronym | Term | Description |
|---|---|---|
| CS | Compute shader | A general-purpose shader program that uses no render state. For example, a GPGPU shader. |
| DS | Domain shader | Shader program that generates vertices from tessellated data. |
| GSM | Global shared memory | 64 KB of on-chip memory shared between shader cores. |
| GPR | General purpose register | Stores temporary data for shader threads. |
| GS | Geometry shader | A shader program that runs on primitives and may produce zero or more output primitives. |
| HS | Hull shader | Shader program that prepares data for tessellation. |
| L1 | Level one data cache | 16 KB read-write first level cache, one per shader core. |
| LSM | Local shared memory | 64 KB of fast dedicated memory shared among the 4 SIMDs in a shader core. |
| PS | Pixel shader | A shader program that runs one instance per pixel in a SIMD-like way. |
| SC | Shader core | A unit that runs shaders. There are 12 shader cores. |
| SGPR | Scalar GPR | A 32-bit register used by the scalar ALU in each shader core, allocated on a per-vector basis. |
| SIMD | Single Instruction Multiple Data | One of four units in a shader core that executes shader vectors. It contains 4 vector scalar processors. |
| SH | Scheduler | A unit that schedules work inside the shader core. |
| SX | Shader export block | A unit that forwards pixel and vertex shader outputs to their respective destinations. |
| TU | Texture unit | A unit that handles texture and buffer memory requests. |
| VGPR | Vector GPR | A register that has 64 elements. Each element corresponds to one of the 64 threads in a shader vector. Each element is 32 bits. |
| VS | Vertex shader | A shader program that runs one instance per vertex in a SIMD-like way. |
| VSP | Vector Scalar Processor | One of four units in a SIMD capable of 4 single-precision float MADDs; thus, a SIMD is a 16-vector of scalar ALUs. |
See the following white papers:
The full list of white papers is available at Xbox Game Developer: White Papers.