AMD GPU architecture programming documentation

Understanding the instruction-level capabilities of any processor is a worthwhile endeavour for any developer writing code for it, even if the instructions that get executed are almost always hidden behind a higher-level language and compiler. If you’re working at that level as most are, the extra understanding you get from knowing exactly how the machine executes will hopefully help you write better code for it.

We’ve been releasing the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) manuals for our GPUs for a long time now, and they reach all the way back to the venerable Radeon R600 (a GPU which helped usher in the DirectX®10 era back in 2006!)

The main purposes of an ISA are to:

1. Specify the language constructs and behavior, including the organization of each type of instruction in both text syntax and binary format.
2. Provide a reference of instruction operation that compiler writers can use to maximize performance of the processor.

These ISAs are intended for programmers writing application and system software, including operating systems, compilers, loaders, linkers, device drivers, and system utilities. It assumes that programmers are writing compute-intensive parallel applications (streaming applications) and assumes an understanding of requisite programming practices.