Comment by vincent-manis

One of the Hennessy/Patterson books has coverage of GPUs. But the definitive description of GPUs at a conceptual undergrad level has yet to be written, I think.

As for microarchitectures, for the most part those have evolved over the last 50 years. If you are looking to extract the last bit of speed out of a CPU, the only complete resource is the documentation. But pipelines and caches have heen around for a long time, look at the System/360 Model 85 and 91. A C programmer can use a fairly primitive conceptual model of a microarchitecture to get a pretty good first-order approximation of performance issues.

I am not saying that we should teach undergrads with 1980s materials. I am saying that a good understanding of pretty much any assembly language can get a programmer pretty far.