spus

Spus is the plural form of SPU, an acronym used in several domains. In computing, SPU most commonly stands for Synergistic Processing Unit, a coprocessor design used in the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) architecture developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. The SPU is designed to handle data-parallel, streaming workloads and to offload compute-intensive tasks from the main CPU, the PPE (Power Processing Element).

Each SPU has its own local storage, a DMA engine to move data between main memory and local storage, and a 128-bit SIMD processing unit. SPUs run code loaded and scheduled by the PPE, and they communicate with the PPE and main memory via DMA descriptors rather than direct addressing. Programming SPUs typically required a separate toolchain and careful memory management to maximize throughput.

Common workloads for SPUs included multimedia processing, physics simulations, cryptography, and vectorized mathematical kernels. While the Cell architecture popularized SPUs, subsequent hardware designs reduced reliance on dedicated SPUs, and modern CPUs and GPUs handle similar tasks with different programming models.

Outside computing, SPU can stand for other terms in different fields, but there is no universally accepted alternative meaning for the acronym SPU beyond context-specific uses.