GPUs are dedicated single-processor chips that can perform large number of parallel operations especially for graphical rendering and mathematical computations.
Although the first GPU, GeForce 256, was introduced by NVIDIA in 1999, this powerful circuitry remained within the high performance gaming community. Recently, GPUs have become widely popular due to the ability of these devices to perform parallel operations in general-purpose programs.
Before the invention of GPU, graphical and mathematical computations were performed by the Central Processing Unit (CPU). However, CPUs were also tasked with carrying out operating system activities and other softwares active on the system. Even the advent of multicore processors could not quench the thirst for performance. GPUs have large number of cores that can perform billions of operations in a second. The presence of dedicated texture unit, rendering unit and floating-point unit make these devices the choice of any gamer.
The power and applicability of GPUs were not fully utilized until it was found suitable for general-purpose programming.
A large number of scientific applications run operations that are independent of each other. The design and organization of GPU make them particularly suitable to perform these operations in parallel. This kick started new research around GPU to develop special algorithms that run on GPUs. Moreover, the ability to transfer control between CPU and GPU allowed for manual intervention, if required, while retaining the computational power, which is not available in super computers. Today, the areas where GPUs are used to achieve the highest performance include image processing, augmented & virtual reality, computational science, energy explorations, super-computing, 3D graphical visualization, game development, computational finance and the list is ever growing.
As GPUs made it into the smart phone arena, many companies are manufacturing these devices. However, the leading market shareholders in this arena are NVidia and AMD. Beyond them, major players in this field are Intel, VIA Technologies, MSI etc. Today, there are a large number of GPU devices available in the market to choose from depending on the need of every type of customer. Creativity of entertainment industry was only limited by the computational power of the devices on which their softwares had to run. With GPUs available on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones, the creativity is unleashed and GPU vendors are racing to catch up with the creative imagination. Who wins the race does not matter to the normal user, but a treat lies ahead of us.