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Agreed that warp is a marketing term, but it is definitely not something that should be called "threads" except in the very loosest sense of the term.

A bunch of threads in parallel implies MIMD parallelism- multiple instructions multiple data.

A warp implies SIMD parallelism - single instruction multiple data (although technically SIMT, single instructions multiple threads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instruction,_multiple_t...).

From both a hardware and software perspective those are very different types of parallelism that Nvidia's architects and the architects of its predecessors at Sun/SGI/Cray/elsewhere were intimately familiar with. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn%27s_taxonomy




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