Gpus

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Electronic circuits designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device; specialized processors optimized for rendering graphics and performing parallel computations; hardware components that handle complex mathematical calculations to enhance video and gaming performance
2. Devices dedicated to handling complex visual data by swiftly processing and rendering graphical content; processing units that excel at parallel tasks including image and video computation; specialized chips used to offload demanding graphical and computational workloads from the main processor
3. Integrated circuits engineered to efficiently perform rendering of images and videos by executing parallel operations; hardware designed to boost graphical performance and accelerate multimedia tasks; processors primarily used to improve visual output and computational efficiency in computers and gaming systems

Etymology: "GPUs" is the plural of "GPU," an abbreviation for "graphics processing unit." The term was popularised by the chipmaker Nvidia, which marketed its GeForce 256 card in 1999 as the first GPU, though the idea of a dedicated graphics chip predates it. The abbreviation follows the pattern of "CPU" (central processing unit), with "graphics" substituted for "central" to describe a chip whose job is drawing images rather than running a computer's general instructions. The word's modern prominence owes much to a later shift. Because a GPU performs many simple calculations at once, researchers discovered in the mid-2000s that the same hardware could accelerate scientific computing, and later machine learning. A chip designed to colour pixels on a screen thus became a workhorse for tasks far removed from graphics, so "GPU" now often names general-purpose parallel hardware rather than anything specifically visual.

Synonyms: graphics cards, graphics processors