Graphics processing unit

A graphics processing unit (GPU), also occasionally called visual processing unit (VPU), is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating computer graphics and image processing, and their highly parallel structure makes them more efficient than general-purpose CPUs for algorithmswhere the processing of large blocks of data is done in parallel. In a personal computer, a GPU can be present on a video card, or it can be embedded on themotherboard or—in certain CPUs—on the CPU die.^[1]

The term GPU was popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256as "the world's first GPU", or Graphics Processing Unit.^[2] It was presented as a "single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that are capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second".^[3] Rival ATI Technologies coined the term "visual processing unit" or VPU with the release of the Radeon 9700 in 2002.^[4]