General-purpose computing on graphics processing units is the use of a graphics processing unit, which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the central processing unit. The use of multiple video cards in one computer, or large numbers of graphics chips, further parallelizes the already parallel nature of graphics processing.
Facts
Disputed
Origin YearMarks a widely cited milestone; GPUs were used informally for general computation before this. Core ConcernUsing a graphics processing unit's parallel architecture to perform general-purpose computation traditionally handled by a CPU. 1 Connections
Associated With
GPU computing (GPGPU) is itself a form of parallel processing between GPUs and CPUs.
Source GPU Computing (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. GPU Computing (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationHistory section, paragraph on the 2003 milestone
A significant milestone for GPGPU was the year 2003 when two research groups independently discovered GPU-based approaches for the solution of general linear algebra problems on GPUs that ran faster than on CPUs.
Lead paragraph, first sentence
General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the central processing unit (CPU).
Associated With: Parallel Computing, Lead section
Essentially, a GPGPU pipeline is a kind of parallel processing between one or more GPUs and CPUs, with special accelerated instructions for processing image or other graphic forms of data.
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