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?
Triangle Vomitorium.
The computer that you stick into your other computer.
Strategic Computational Retro Offboard Turbo Encabulator
Parallel Processing Unit: PPU
heh, you said “PP”.
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.
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
Ok you can call it a geometry coprocessor
Expensive card
Computational shotgun.
AIPU. Or “AI stinks” for short.
Parallel compute accelerator.
Nobody is gonna say that in full, just like “graphics processing unit” becomes “GPU”, so maybe “PCA”.
Aka ones ‘pecca’
Pissy, eh.
They are GPUs.
All of them, even the H100, B100, and MI300X all have texture units, pixel shaders, everything. They are graphics cards at a low level. Only the MI300X is missing ROPs, but the Nvidia cards have them (and can run realtime games on Linux), and they all can be used in Blender and such.
The compute programming languages they use are, fundamentally, hacked up abstractions to map to the same GPU hardware in consumer stuff.
That’s the whole point, they’re architected as GPUs so that they’re backwards compatible, as everything’s built on the days when consumer gaming GPUs were hacked to be used for compute.
Are there more dedicated accelerators? Yes. They’re called ASICs, or application specific integrated circuits. This is technically a broad term, but mostly its connotation is very purpose made compute.
The 5090 is missing rops too
LMAO
Thinky boi, or computy boi.
Thinky boi is the CPU. GPU are also thinky but they are in parallel so plural. Thinky bois.
Mathematical Image Creation Engine.
MICE.
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”
