Supported GPUs

WAVE targets four GPU vendor families through dedicated compiler backends. This page lists the GPUs that have been verified, those expected to work based on architecture compatibility, and the emulator fallback for development without a GPU.

Verified Hardware

These GPUs have passed the full WAVE spec-verification test suite, confirming correct behavior for all 11 primitive categories.

Vendor	GPU	Architecture	Backend	Status
Apple	M4 Pro	Apple GPU (Metal 3)	`wave-metal`	Verified
NVIDIA	T4	Turing (SM 7.5)	`wave-ptx`	Verified
AMD	MI300X	CDNA 3	`wave-hip`	Verified

Expected Compatible Hardware

These GPUs share the same architecture family as verified hardware and are expected to work. They have not yet been tested with the full spec-verification suite.

Vendor	GPU	Architecture	Backend	Status
Apple	M1	Apple GPU (Metal 3)	`wave-metal`	Expected
Apple	M1 Pro / Max / Ultra	Apple GPU (Metal 3)	`wave-metal`	Expected
Apple	M2	Apple GPU (Metal 3)	`wave-metal`	Expected
Apple	M2 Pro / Max / Ultra	Apple GPU (Metal 3)	`wave-metal`	Expected
Apple	M3	Apple GPU (Metal 3)	`wave-metal`	Expected
Apple	M3 Pro / Max / Ultra	Apple GPU (Metal 3)	`wave-metal`	Expected
Apple	M4	Apple GPU (Metal 3)	`wave-metal`	Expected
Apple	M4 Max / Ultra	Apple GPU (Metal 3)	`wave-metal`	Expected
NVIDIA	RTX 2060-2080 Ti	Turing (SM 7.5)	`wave-ptx`	Expected
NVIDIA	RTX 3060-3090 Ti	Ampere (SM 8.6)	`wave-ptx`	Expected
NVIDIA	A100	Ampere (SM 8.0)	`wave-ptx`	Expected
NVIDIA	RTX 4060-4090	Ada Lovelace (SM 8.9)	`wave-ptx`	Expected
NVIDIA	H100	Hopper (SM 9.0)	`wave-ptx`	Expected
AMD	RX 7900 XTX	RDNA 3	`wave-hip`	Expected
AMD	RX 7600	RDNA 3	`wave-hip`	Expected
AMD	MI250X	CDNA 2	`wave-hip`	Expected
Intel	Arc A770	Xe HPG (Alchemist)	`wave-sycl`	Pending
Intel	Data Center GPU Max (Ponte Vecchio)	Xe HPC	`wave-sycl`	Pending

Status definitions:

Verified - all 11 primitive categories pass the spec-verification test suite on this hardware.
Expected - same architecture family as a verified GPU; not yet tested.
Pending - backend implementation is complete but hardware access for verification is not yet available.

Emulator Fallback

When no supported GPU is detected, WAVE automatically falls back to wave-emu, a CPU-based instruction-level emulator. The emulator executes the same .wbin binary that would run on a GPU, so kernels behave identically regardless of whether they are running on hardware or in emulation.

The emulator is useful for:

Development - write and debug kernels on a laptop without a discrete GPU.
CI/CD - run the full test suite in cloud environments that lack GPU instances.
Correctness testing - compare emulator output against hardware output to detect backend translation bugs.

To force emulator mode even when a GPU is available:

# Environment variable (works with all SDKs)
WAVE_BACKEND=emulator python my_kernel.py

# Python SDK - explicit backend selection
import wave_gpu
device = wave_gpu.device(backend="emulator")

// Rust SDK - explicit backend selection
let dev = wave_sdk::device::with_backend(wave_sdk::Backend::Emulator);

The emulator runs single-threaded by default. Set WAVE_EMU_THREADS to enable multi-threaded emulation for larger workloads:

WAVE_EMU_THREADS=8 WAVE_BACKEND=emulator python my_kernel.py

Checking Your Hardware

Every SDK provides a detection function that reports the selected backend:

# CLI
wave-emu --detect

# Python
python -c "import wave_gpu; print(wave_gpu.detect_backend())"

# Rust (in a binary)
wave_sdk::device::detect().map(|d| println!("{:?}", d.backend()));

Possible output values: metal, ptx, hip, sycl, emulator.

Next: Introduction to the ISA - learn how WAVE instructions are encoded and executed.