Graphics Processing Unit

References

• Graphics Processing Unit Wikipedia Article

Related

• embarrassingly parallel
• • In parallel computing, an embarrassingly parallel workload or problem is one where little to no effort is needed to split the problem into a number of parallel tasks. This is due to minimal or no dependency upon communication between the parallel tasks, or for results between them. These differ from distributed computing problems, which need communication between tasks, especially communication of intermediate results. They are easier to perform on server farms which lack the special infrastructure built in a true supercomputer cluster.
  • A common example of an embarrassingly parallel problem is 3D video rendering handled by a graphics processing unit, where each frame (forward method) or pixel (ray tracing method) can be handled with no interdependency.
• parallel structure
• • Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level, instruction-level, data, and task parallelism. As power consumption by computers has become a concern in recent years, parallel computing has become the dominant paradigm in computer architecture, mainly in the form of multi-core processors.
  • In computer science, parallelism and concurrency are two different things: a parallel program uses multiple CPU cores, each core performing a task independently. On the other hand, concurrency enables a program to deal with multiple tasks even on a single CPU core; the core switches between tasks (threads) without necessarily completing each one.
  • Parallel computers can be roughly classified according to the level at which the hardware supports parallelism.
• OpenGL
• • OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The APU is typically used to interact with a graphical processing unit (GPPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.
• framebuffer
• • A framebuffer is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Modern video cards contain framebuffer circuitry in their cores. In computing, a screen buffer is a part of computer memory used by a computer application for the representation for the content to be shown on the computer display. The screen buffer may also be called the video buffer, the regeneration buffer, or regen buffer for short.
  • The information in the buffer typically consists of color values for every pixel to be shown on the display. Color values are commonly stored in 1-bit binary (monochrome), 4-bit palettized, 8-bit palettized, 16-bit high color and 24-bit true color formats.

Notes

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure, Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.

Arcade system boards have used specialized graphics circuits since the 1970s. The NEC PD7220 was the first implementation of a personal computer graphics display processor as a single large-scale integration (LSI) integrated circuit chip. Throughout the 1990s, 2D GUI acceleration evolved. As manufacturing capabilities improved, so did the level of integration of graphics chips. The term GPU was coined by Sony in reference to the 32-bit Sony GPU in the PlayStation video game console, released in 1994. OpenGL was introduced in the early '90s by SGI as a professional graphics API, with proprietary hardware support for 3D rasterization. Nvidia was first to produce a chip capable of programmable shading: the GeForce 3. Each pixel could now be processed by a short program that could include additional image textures as inputs, and each geometric vertex could likewise be processed by a short program before it was projected onto the screen. In the 2020s, GPUs have been increasingly used for calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems, such as training of neural networks on enormous datasets that are needed for large language models.

Many companies have produced GPUs under a number of brand names. In 2009, Intel, Nvidia, and AMD/ATI ware the market share leaders, with 49.4%, 27.8%, and 20.6% market share respectively.

Modern GPUs have traditionally used most of their transistors to do calculations related to 3D computer graphics, In addition to the 3D hardware, today's GPUs include basic 2D acceleration and framebuffer capabilities. GPUs were initially used to accelerate the memory-intensive work of texture mapping and rending polygons. Later, units were added to accelerate geometric calculation such as the rotation and translation of vertices into different coordinate systems. Recent developments in GPUs include support for programmable shaders which can manipulate vertices and textures with many of the same operations that are supported by CUs, oversampling, and interpolation techniques to reduce aliasing, and very high precision color spaces.

Several factors of GPU construction affect the performance of the card for real-time rendering, such as the size of connector pathways in the semiconductor device fabrication, the clock signal frequency, and the number and size of various on-chip memory caches. GPU performance is typically measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS); GPUs in the 2010s and 2020s typically deliver performance measured in teraflops (TFLOPS).

In personal computers, there are two main forms of GPUs. Each has many synonyms:

• Dedicated graphics also called discrete graphics
• Integrated graphics also called shared graphics solutions, integrated graphics processors (IGP), or unified memory architecture (UMA)

Dedicated graphics processing units uses RAM that id dedicated to the GPU rather than relying on the computer's main system memory. The RAM is usually specially selected for the expected serial workload of the graphics card. Some systems with dedicated discrete GPUs are called DIS systems as opposed to UNA systems.

Dedicated GPUs are not necessarily removable nor does it necessarily have an interface with the motherboard in a standard fashion. The term dedicated refers to the fact that the graphics cards have RAM that is dedicated to the card's use, not to the fact that most dedicated GPUs are removable.

Integrated graphics processing units (IGPU), integrated graphics, shared graphics solutions, integrated graphics processors (IGP), or unified memory architectures (UMA) use a portion of a computer's system RAM rather than dedicated graphics memory.

An external GPU is a graphics processor located outside of the housing of the computer, similar to a large external hard drive. External graphics processors are sometimes used with laptop computers. Laptops might have a substantial amount of RAM and a sufficiently powerful central processing unit (CPU), but often lack a powerful graphics processor, and instead have a less powerful but more energy-efficient on-board graphics chip. Therefore, it is desirable to attach a GPU to some external bus of a notebook.

Graphics processing units (GPU) have continued to increase in energy usage, while CPU designers have recently been focused on improving performance per watt.

In 2013, 438.3 million GPUs were shipped globally and the forecast for 2014 was 414.2 million. However, by the third quarter of 2022, shipments of integrated GPUs totaled around 75.5 million units, down 19% year-over-year.