Maxwell is NVIDIA's next-generation architecture for CUDA compute applications. Maxwell introduces an all-new design for the Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) that dramatically improves energy efficiency. Improvements to control logic partitioning, workload balancing, clock-gating granularity, compiler-based scheduling, number of instructions issued per clock cycle, and many other enhancements allow the Maxwell SM (also called SMM) to far exceed Kepler SMX efficiency.

Maxwell retains and extends the same CUDA programming model as in previous NVIDIA architectures such as Fermi and Kepler, and applications that follow the best practices for those architectures should typically see speedups on the Maxwell architecture without any code changes.

The following documents provide more details about programming and tuning code for Maxwell GPUs.