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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 component on a discrete graphics card or embedded on , , personal computers, , and . GPUs are increasingly being used for artificial intelligence (AI) processing due to linear algebra acceleration which is also used extensively in graphics processing.
Although there is no single definition of the term, and it may be used to describe any video display system, in modern use a GPU includes the ability to internally perform the calculations needed for various graphics tasks, like rotating and scaling 3D images, and often the additional ability to run custom programs known as . This contrasts with earlier graphics controllers known as video display controllers which had no internal calculation capabilities, or , which performed only basic memory movement operations. The modern GPU emerged during the 1990s, adding the ability to perform operations like drawing lines and text without CPU help, and later adding 3D functionality.
Graphics functions are generally independent and this lends these tasks to being implemented on separate calculation engines. Modern GPUs include hundreds, or thousands, of calculation units. This made them useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. The ability of GPUs to rapidly perform vast numbers of calculations has led to their adoption in diverse fields including artificial intelligence (AI) where they excel at handling data-intensive and computationally demanding tasks. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and GPU mining.
A specialized barrel shifter circuit helped the CPU animate the framebuffer graphics for various 1970s arcade video games from Midway Games and Taito, such as Gun Fight (1975), Sea Wolf (1976), and Space Invaders (1978).
The Namco Galaxian arcade system in 1979 used specialized graphics hardware that supported RGB color, multi-colored sprites, and Tile engine backgrounds. The Galaxian hardware was widely used during the golden age of arcade video games, by game companies such as Namco, Centuri, Gremlin, Irem, Konami, Midway, Nichibutsu, Sega, and Taito.
The Atari 2600 in 1977 used a video shifter called the Television Interface Adaptor. Atari 8-bit computers (1979) had ANTIC, a video processor which interpreted instructions describing a "display list"—the way the scan lines map to specific bitmapped or character modes and where the memory is stored (so there did not need to be a contiguous frame buffer). 6502 machine code could be triggered on by setting a bit on a display list instruction. ANTIC also supported smooth vertical and horizontal scrolling independent of the CPU.
In 1984, Hitachi released the ARTC HD63484, the first major CMOS graphics processor for personal computers. The ARTC could display up to 4K resolution when in monochrome mode. It was used in a number of graphics cards and terminals during the late 1980s. In 1985, the Amiga was released with a custom graphics chip including a blitter for bitmap manipulation, line drawing, and area fill. It also included a coprocessor with its own simple instruction set, that was capable of manipulating graphics hardware registers in sync with the video beam (e.g. for per-scanline palette switches, sprite multiplexing, and hardware windowing), or driving the blitter. In 1986, Texas Instruments released the TMS34010, the first fully programmable graphics processor. It could run general-purpose code but also had a graphics-oriented instruction set. During 1990–1992, this chip became the basis of the Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture ("TIGA") Windows accelerator cards.
In 1987, the IBM 8514 graphics system was released. It was one of the first video cards for IBM PC compatibles that implemented fixed-function 2D primitives in electronic hardware. Sharp's X68000, released in 1987, used a custom graphics chipset with a 65,536 color palette and hardware support for sprites, scrolling, and multiple playfields. It served as a development machine for Capcom's CP System arcade board. Fujitsu's FM Towns computer, released in 1989, had support for a 16,777,216 color palette. In 1988, the first dedicated polygonal 3D graphics boards were introduced in arcades with the Namco System 21 and Taito Air System.
IBM introduced its proprietary Video Graphics Array (VGA) display standard in 1987, with a maximum resolution of 640×480 pixels. In November 1988, NEC announced its creation of the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) to develop and promote a Super VGA (SVGA) computer display standard as a successor to VGA. Super VGA enabled graphics display resolutions up to 800×600 , a 56% increase.
In the early- and mid-1990s, real-time 3D graphics became increasingly common in arcade, computer, and console games, which led to increasing public demand for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. Early examples of mass-market 3D graphics hardware can be found in arcade system boards such as the Sega Model 1, Namco System 22, and Sega Model 2, and the fifth-generation video game consoles such as the Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and Nintendo 64. Arcade systems such as the Sega Model 2 and Silicon Graphics SGI Onyx-based Namco Magic Edge Hornet Simulator in 1993 were capable of hardware T&L (transform, clipping, and lighting) years before appearing in consumer graphics cards. Another early example is the Super FX chip, a RISC-based on-cartridge graphics chip used in some SNES games, notably Doom and Star Fox. Some systems used DSPs to accelerate transformations. Fujitsu, which worked on the Sega Model 2 arcade system, began working on integrating T&L into a single LSI solution for use in home computers in 1995;
the Fujitsu Pinolite, the first 3D geometry processor for personal computers, announced in 1997. The first hardware T&L GPU on Home console video game consoles was the Nintendo 64's Reality Coprocessor, released in 1996. In 1997, Mitsubishi released the AMD FirePro, a GPU capable of transformation and lighting, for and Windows NT desktops; ATi used it for its FireGL graphics card, released in 1997.
The term "GPU" was coined by Sony in reference to the 32-bit Sony GPU (designed by Toshiba) in the PlayStation video game console, released in 1994.
With the introduction of the Nvidia GeForce 8 series and new generic stream processing units, GPUs became more generalized computing devices. Parallel GPUs are making computational inroads against the CPU, and a subfield of research, dubbed GPU computing or GPGPU for general purpose computing on GPU, has found applications in fields as diverse as machine learning, (2009). 9781605585161, Dl.acm.org. ISBN 9781605585161 oil exploration, scientific image processing, linear algebra, "Linear algebra operators for GPU implementation of numerical algorithms", Kruger and Westermann, International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 2005 statistics, 3D reconstruction, and stock options pricing. GPGPUs were the precursors to what is now called a compute shader (e.g. CUDA, OpenCL, DirectCompute) and actually abused the hardware to a degree by treating the data passed to algorithms as texture maps and executing algorithms by drawing a triangle or quad with an appropriate pixel shader. This entails some overheads since units like the Rasterization are involved where they are not needed (nor are triangle manipulations even a concern—except to invoke the pixel shader).
Nvidia's CUDA platform, first introduced in 2007, was the earliest widely adopted programming model for GPU computing. OpenCL is an open standard defined by the Khronos Group that allows for the development of code for both GPUs and CPUs with an emphasis on portability. OpenCL solutions are supported by Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and ARM, and according to a report in 2011 by Evans Data, OpenCL had become the second most popular HPC tool.
The PS4 and Xbox One were released in 2013; they both used GPUs based on AMD's Radeon HD 7850 and 7790. Nvidia's Kepler line of GPUs was followed by the Maxwell line, manufactured on the same process. Nvidia's 28 nm chips were manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan using the 28 nm process. Compared to the 40 nm technology from the past, this manufacturing process allowed a 20 percent boost in performance while drawing less power. Virtual reality headsets have high system requirements; manufacturers recommended the GTX 970 and the R9 290X or better at the time of their release. Cards based on the Pascal microarchitecture were released in 2016. The GeForce 10 series of cards are of this generation of graphics cards. They are made using the 16 nm manufacturing process which improves upon previous microarchitectures.
In 2018, Nvidia launched the RTX 20 series GPUs that added ray tracing cores to GPUs, improving their performance on lighting effects. Polaris 11 and Polaris 10 GPUs from AMD are fabricated by a 14 nm process. Their release resulted in a substantial increase in the performance per watt of AMD video cards. AMD also released the Vega GPU series for the high end market as a competitor to Nvidia's high end Pascal cards, also featuring HBM2 like the Titan V.
In 2019, AMD released the successor to their Graphics Core Next (GCN) microarchitecture/instruction set. Dubbed RDNA, the first product featuring it was the Radeon RX 5000 series of video cards.AMD press release: The company announced that the successor to the RDNA microarchitecture would be incremental (a "refresh"). AMD unveiled the Radeon RX 6000 series, its RDNA 2 graphics cards with support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
The product series, launched in late 2020, consisted of the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT.
The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S were released in 2020; they both use GPUs based on the RDNA 2 microarchitecture with incremental improvements and different GPU configurations in each system's implementation.
In personal computers, there are two main forms of GPUs: dedicated graphics (also called discrete graphics) and integrated graphics (also called shared graphics solutions, integrated graphics processors (IGP), or unified memory architecture (UMA)).
Technologies such as Scan-Line Interleave by 3dfx, Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and NVLink by Nvidia and ATI CrossFire by AMD allow multiple GPUs to draw images simultaneously for a single screen, increasing the processing power available for graphics. These technologies, however, are increasingly uncommon; most games do not fully use multiple GPUs, as most users cannot afford them. Multiple GPUs are still used on supercomputers (such as in Summit); on workstations to accelerate video (processing multiple videos at once)
and 3D rendering;
for visual effects (VFX);
Because GPU computations are memory-intensive, integrated processing may compete with the CPU for relatively slow system RAM, as it has minimal or no dedicated video memory. IGPs use system memory with bandwidth up to a current maximum of 128 gigabytes per second, whereas a discrete graphics card may have a bandwidth of more than 1000 gigabytes per second between its video random access memory (VRAM) and GPU core. This memory bus bandwidth can limit the performance of the GPU, though multi-channel memory can mitigate this deficiency. Older integrated graphics chipsets lacked hardware transform and lighting, but newer ones include it.
On systems with "Unified Memory Architecture" (UMA), including modern AMD processors with integrated graphics, modern Intel processors with integrated graphics, Apple processors, the PS5 and Xbox Series (among others), the CPU cores and the GPU block share the same pool of RAM and memory address space.
GPU-based high performance computers play a significant role in large-scale modelling. Three of the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world take advantage of GPU acceleration.
Since 2005 there has been interest in using the performance offered by GPUs for evolutionary computation in general, and for accelerating the fitness evaluation in genetic programming in particular. Most approaches compile linear or tree programs on the host PC and transfer the executable to the GPU to be run. Typically a performance advantage is only obtained by running the single active program simultaneously on many example problems in parallel, using the GPU's single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) architecture.
Substantial acceleration can also be obtained by not compiling the programs, and instead transferring them to the GPU, to be interpreted there.
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