Название: The History of the GPU - Steps to Invention
Автор: Jon Peddie
Издательство: Springer
Год: 2022
Страниц: 424
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 15.4 MB

This is the first book in a three-part series that traces the development of the GPU. Initially developed for games the GPU can now be found in cars, supercomputers, watches, game consoles and more. GPU concepts go back to the 1970s when computer graphics was developed for computer-aided design of automobiles and airplanes. Early computer graphics systems were adopted by the film industry and simulators for airplanes and high energy physics—exploding nuclear bombs in computers instead of the atmosphere.

A GPU has an integrated transform and lighting engine, but these were not available until the end of the 1990s. Heroic and historic companies expanded the development and capabilities of the graphics controller in pursuit of the ultimate device, a fully integrated self-contained GPU.

Fifteen companies worked on building the first fully integrated GPU, some succeeded in the console, and Northbridge segments, and Nvidia was the first to offer a fully integrated GPU for the PC. Today the GPU can be found in every platform that involves a computer and a user interface.

Graphical processor units—GPUs have used the transistor bounty of Moore’s law to improve their richness and quality. Scene rendering employing fixed shaders, programmable vertex shaders, pixels shaders, and raytracing coupled with the abundance of workload parallelism has made discrete GPUs command a market and use/case that has been impervious to CPU integration. The GPU has proven to be the most cost-effective device available, from high-end games, visualization, and HPC to smartphones, laptops, and other mobile environments in vehicles.

The Pipeline. This book has many examples of the GPU pipeline as it evolves and goes from one era to the next. You will also learn that there are several names for the same thing. That is an evolutionary throwback. For example, a triangle might be called a polygon or a primitive. Rasterization might be called scan conversion, etc.

The graphics processor unit—GPU, is a component in a computer. That computer can be a PC, a game console, a smartphone, a vehicle, a point-of-sale (POS) machine, a supercomputer, or a robot. The GPU itself can be a stand-alone device or integrated within another semiconductor such as a CPU or a system on a chip (SoC). The GPU magnificently evolved from its first incarnation with a fixed transform and lighting engine (T&L) to an elaborate programmable parallel processor with thousands of floating-point processors—and there seems no end in sight.

Contents:
1. Introduction
2. 1980–1989, Graphics Controllers on Other Platforms
3. 1980–1989, Graphics Controllers on PCs
4. 1980–1995 the Progenitors: Graphics Controller on PCs
5. 1990 to 1999 Graphics Controllers on Other Platform
6. 1996–1999, Graphics Controllers on PCs
7. What is a GPU?