drivers particularly on modern microsoft windows u00ae platforms can run in kernel mode ring 0 or in user mode ring 3 the primary benefit of running a driver in user mode is improved stability since a poorly written user mode device driver cannot crash the system by overwriting kernel memory on the other hand user kernel mode transitions usually impose a considerable performance overhead thereby prohibiting user mode drivers for low latency and high throughput requirements kernel space can be accessed by user module only through the use of system calls end user programs like the unix shell or other gui based applications are part of the user space these applications interact with hardware through kernel supported functions cpu 102 can include not shown one or more of a control processor field programmable gate array fpga application specific integrated circuit asic or digital signal processor dsp cpu 102 for example executes the control logic including the operating system 108 kmd 110 sws 112 and applications 111 that control the operation of computing system 100 in this illustrative embodiment cpu 102 according to one embodiment initiates and controls the execution of applications 111 by for example distributing the processing associated with that application across the cpu 102 and other processing resources such as the apd 104 apd 104 among other things executes commands and programs for selected functions such as graphics operations and other operations that may be for example particularly suited for parallel processing in general apd 104 can be frequently used for executing graphics pipeline operations such as pixel operations geometric computations and rendering an image to a display in various embodiments of the present invention apd 104 can also execute compute processing operations e g those operations unrelated to graphics such as for example.