Supported GPUs

WAVE has backends for Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPUs. Hardware support depends on the operations a kernel uses and the installed vendor toolchain.

Tested hardware

WAVE hardware verification includes these devices:

Vendor	GPU	Architecture	Backend
Apple	M4 Pro	Apple GPU	`wave-metal`
NVIDIA	T4	Turing, SM 7.5	`wave-ptx`
AMD	MI300X	CDNA 3	`wave-hip`

The hardware verification page describes the matched benchmark study on Apple M4 Pro and NVIDIA T4. Intel hardware verification is pending.

Other devices

The backends target Metal, PTX, HIP, and SYCL rather than individual GPU models. Other devices that support these toolchains are candidate targets. Run correctness checks on the intended device before relying on its results. Wave width, numeric capabilities, and resource limits can differ between devices.

Backend	Required vendor toolchain
`wave-metal`	Metal
`wave-ptx`	CUDA
`wave-hip`	ROCm
`wave-sycl`	Intel oneAPI

Emulator

The CPU emulator executes WAVE binaries without a GPU. Use it to test kernel behavior and compare outputs with hardware execution. It does not model GPU timing.

The quick start runs a kernel explicitly through the emulator. SDK execution paths and fallback behavior are described in the language guides.

Device detection

The Python SDK reports the selected device:

import wave_gpu

print(wave_gpu.device())

The Rust SDK exposes the same device information:

use wave_gpu::device;

fn main() -> Result<(), wave_gpu::RuntimeError> {
    let dev = device::detect()?;
    println!("{}: {:?}", dev.name, dev.vendor);
    Ok(())
}

See Installation for SDK setup and Backends for translation details.