what is “SASS” short for? [closed]

Answer 1

Since there seems to be no information on this anywhere, I can only guess: Shader ASSembly language

Answer 2

Streaming ASSembly? Since NVIDIA calls their cores, "Streaming Multiprocessors".

Answer 3

SASS (as Ashwin points out probably "Shader ASSembly") is the binary code that runs on the metal of Fermi architecture devices. What cudaobjdump (and older third party tools like decuda and nv50dis) show is a direct disassembly of the cubin payload emitted by the ptxas assembler.

To the best of my knowledge there is no open instruction set documentation for any NVIDIA GPUs.

At some point during the CUDA 5 release cycle, NVIDIA began to provide a summary document which annotates the basic instruction set of suported GPUs (Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell as of CUDA 7).

Answer 4

Streaming ASSembler.... I should know since I invented the term, lead the core team G80 streaming process architecture team and developed first SASS assembler ;-)