I now do some work with computers that involves making graphics cards do computational work on a headless server. The computational work it does has nothing to do with graphics.
The name is more for consumers based off the most common use for graphics cards and why they were first made in the 90s but now they’re used for all sorts of computational workloads. So what are some more fitting names for the part?
I now think of them as ‘computation engines’ analagous to a old car engine. Its where the computational horsepower is really generated. But how would ram make sense in this analogy?
GPU
Triangle Vomitorium.
Coincidentally the same name as my geometry themed experimental grunge rock band
The computer that you stick into your other computer.
Strategic Computational Retro Offboard Turbo Encabulator
GPUs are specialized to be able to very quickly manipulate vectors, by using a principle called Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD). Where a CPU would have to individually operate on each element of a vector, a GPU can operate on all the elements in one go.
So maybe you could call it a SIMD card or Vector Accelerator or something like that.
Expensive card
Parallel Processing Unit: PPU
How the turntables
Nintendo called the 2d graphics chips on the NES and SNES the “PPU” (picture processing unit)
heh, you said “PP”.
Ok you can call it a geometry coprocessor
I’m old enough to remember when these were called ‘Accelerator Cards’.
How are your knees and back treating you, fellow old person?
My knees and back are fine
My wrists and fingers are war veterans
F
AIPU. Or “AI stinks” for short.
Computational shotgun.
Mathematical Image Creation Engine.
MICE.
Floating point processor.
Thinky boi, or computy boi.
Thinky boi is the CPU. GPU are also thinky but they are in parallel so plural. Thinky bois.
Back in the day, you could slap a math coprocessor on your system so it could do floating point maths real gud.
Now, you slap in some card that does floating point maths even guder, but also in parallel in yuge vectors.
So my proposed name is “It’s like an old Cray supercomputer but real tiny”
