Graphics processing unit
GPUs ability to perform vast numbers of calculations rapidly has led to their adoption in diverse fields including artificial intelligence (AI) where it excels at handling data-intensive and computationally demanding tasks.
[1] A specialized barrel shifter circuit helped the CPU animate the framebuffer graphics for various 1970s arcade video games from Midway and Taito, such as Gun Fight (1975), Sea Wolf (1976), and Space Invaders (1978).
[2] The Namco Galaxian arcade system in 1979 used specialized graphics hardware that supported RGB color, multi-colored sprites, and tilemap backgrounds.
[5] 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).
[clarification needed][6] 6502 machine code subroutines could be triggered on scan lines by setting a bit on a display list instruction.
[10] The Williams Electronics arcade games Robotron 2084, Joust, Sinistar, and Bubbles, all released in 1982, contain custom blitter chips for operating on 16-color bitmaps.
[13] In 1985, the Amiga was released with a custom graphics chip including a blitter for bitmap manipulation, line drawing, and area fill.
Sharp's X68000, released in 1987, used a custom graphics chipset[15] with a 65,536 color palette and hardware support for sprites, scrolling, and multiple playfields.
Arcade systems such as the Sega Model 2 and 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.
[31] In the PC world, notable failed attempts for low-cost 3D graphics chips included the S3 ViRGE, ATI Rage, and Matrox Mystique.
In 1997, Rendition collaborated with Hercules and Fujitsu on a "Thriller Conspiracy" project which combined a Fujitsu FXG-1 Pinolite geometry processor with a Vérité V2200 core to create a graphics card with a full T&L engine years before Nvidia's GeForce 256; This card, designed to reduce the load placed upon the system's CPU, never made it to market.
Although it was little known at the time, SGI had contracted with Microsoft to transition from Unix to the forthcoming Windows NT OS, the deal which was signed in 1995 was not announced publicly until 1998.
In this era Microsoft merged their internal Direct3D and OpenGL teams and worked closely with SGI to unify driver standards for both industrial and consumer 3D graphics hardware accelerators.
Microsoft ran annual events for 3D chip makers called "Meltdowns" to test their 3D hardware and drivers to work both with Direct3D and OpenGL.
Details of this era are documented extensively in the books: "Game of X" v.1 and v.2 by Russel Demaria, "Renegades of the Empire" by Mike Drummond, "Opening the Xbox" by Dean Takahashi and "Masters of Doom" by David Kushner.
Used in the Xbox console, this chip competed with the one in the PlayStation 2, which used a custom vector unit for hardware accelerated vertex processing (commonly referred to as VU0/VU1).
In October 2002, with the introduction of the ATI Radeon 9700 (also known as R300), the world's first Direct3D 9.0 accelerator, pixel and vertex shaders could implement looping and lengthy floating point math, and were quickly becoming as flexible as CPUs, yet orders of magnitude faster for image-array operations.
Pixel shading is often used for bump mapping, which adds texture to make an object look shiny, dull, rough, or even round or extruded.
[32] With the introduction of the Nvidia GeForce 8 series and new generic stream processing units, GPUs became more generalized computing devices.
[clarification needed] Nvidia's CUDA platform, first introduced in 2007,[36] 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.
This resulted in a large nominal market share, as the majority of computers with an Intel CPU also featured this embedded graphics processor.
Dedicated GPUs for portable computers are most commonly interfaced through a non-standard and often proprietary slot due to size and weight constraints.
Technologies such as Scan-Line Interleave by 3dfx, SLI and NVLink by Nvidia and CrossFire by AMD allow multiple GPUs to draw images simultaneously for a single screen, increasing the processing power available for graphics.
Since 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.
The two largest discrete (see "Dedicated graphics processing unit" above) GPU designers, AMD and Nvidia, are pursuing this approach with an array of applications.
They are generally suited to high-throughput computations that exhibit data-parallelism to exploit the wide vector width SIMD architecture of the GPU.
[citation needed] 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.
Typically a performance advantage is only obtained by running the single active program simultaneously on many example problems in parallel, using the GPU's SIMD architecture.
[clarification needed][102] Graphics processing units (GPU) have continued to increase in energy usage, while CPUs designers have recently[when?]
