What is Graphic Processing Unit?

[Balgovind]

What is Graphic Processor Unit in the processor kit?

[Russell]

A graphics processing unit or GPU (also occasionally called visual processing unit or VPU) is a dedicated graphics rendering device for a personal computer, workstation, or game console.
Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for a range of complex algorithms.

Location(where it is placed in the kit):
A GPU can sit on top of a video card, or it can be integrated directly into the motherboard. More than 90% of new desktop and notebook computers have integrated GPUs, which are usually far less powerful than those on a video card.

• A GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is a processor attached to a graphics card dedicated to calculating floating point operations and the like.
• A graphics accelerator incorporates custom microchips which contain special mathematical operations commonly used in graphics rendering.
• The efficiency of the microchips therefore determines the effectiveness of the graphics accelerator.
• They are mainly used for playing 3D games or high-end 3D rendering.
• A GPU implements a number of graphics primitive operations in a way that makes running them much faster than drawing directly to the screen with the host CPU.
• The most common operations for early 2D computer graphics include the BitBLT operation (combines several bitmap patterns using a RasterOp), usually in special hardware called a "blitter", and operations for drawing rectangles, triangles, circles, and arcs.
• Modern GPUs also have support for 3D computer graphics, and typically include digital video–related functions.

[MattyBoy]

GPU or Graphic Processing Unit is specially designed for handling computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the CPU. It is made possible by the addition of programmable stages and higher precision arithmetic to the rendering pipelines, which allows software developers to use stream processing on non-graphics data.
GPU functionality has, traditionally, been very limited. In fact, for many years the GPU was only used to accelerate certain parts of the graphics pipeline.

One of the techniques of using GPU is GPGPU i.e General Purpose Computing on Graphic Processing Units

[Joshua]

Used primarily for 3-D applications, a graphics processing unit is a single-chip processor that creates lighting effects and transforms objects every time a 3D scene is redrawn. These are mathematically-intensive tasks, which otherwise, would put quite a strain on the CPU. Lifting this burden from the CPU frees up cycles that can be used for other jobs.

Developers : The first company to develop the GPU is NVIDIA Inc.

Capability : The GeForce 256 GPU is capable of billions of calculations per second, can process a minimum of 10 million polygons per second, and has over 22 million transistors, compared to the 9 million found on the Pentium III. Its workstation version called the Quadro, designed for CAD applications, can process over 200 billion operations a second and deliver up to 17 million triangles per second.