All terms
Hardware & Systems
Host Device Transfer
Moving data between CPU (host) memory and accelerator (device) memory.
Definition
Host device transfer is the movement of data between the host — the CPU and its system memory — and the device, meaning an accelerator such as a GPU and its onboard memory. These transfers usually cross a link like PCIe, which is far slower than the accelerator's internal memory bandwidth. Because of this, frequent or large transfers can become a bottleneck, so efficient pipelines minimize them by keeping data resident on the device.