GPU architectures have evolved over time and memory architectures have changed considerably. If we take a look at the last four generations, there are some common patterns which emerge, some of which are as follows:
- The memory capacity, in general, has increased in levels.
- The memory bandwidth and capacity have increased with new generation architectures.
The following table shows the properties for the last four generations:
| Memory type | Properties | Volta V100 | Pascal P100 | Maxwell M60 | Kepler K80 |
| Register | Size per SM | 256 KB | 256 KB | 256 KB | 256 KB |
| L1 | Size | 32...128 KiB | 24 KiB | 24 KiB | 16...48 KiB |
| Line size | 32 | 32 B | 32 B | 128 B | |
| L2 | Size | 6144 KiB | 4,096 KiB | 2,048 KiB | 1,536 Kib |
| Line size | 64 B | 32B | 32B | 32B | |
| Shared memory | Size per SMX | Up to 96 KiB | 64 KiB | 64 KiB | 48 KiB |
| Size per GPU | up to 7,689 KiB | 3,584 KiB | 1,536 KiB | 624 KiB | |
| Theoretical bandwidth | 13,800 GiB... |