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I'm not sure whether this is the reason in this case, but it's worth noting that NVIDIA marketing (ab)uses the term "GPU" in a very particular way. Basically, t

I'm not sure whether this is the reason in this case, but it's worth noting that NVIDIA marketing (ab)uses the term "GPU" in a very particular way. Basically, their definition is contrived to make the GeForce 256 the first GPU ever. > NVIDIA invents the graphics processing unit, putting it on a path to reshape the industry. GeForce 256 is launched as the world's first GPU, a term NVIDIA defines as "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second. [1] [1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/corporate-timeline/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/corporate-timeline...

aidenn0 8y ago
That's only mildly off-putting to me since nvidia marketing invented the term GPU.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  They definitely popularized it, but they didn't invent it. The graphics chip of the PlayStation was referred to as the "GPU" at least as far back as 1995, and I don't think NVIDIA had any involvement in its development or marketing (although the company was founded early enough for that to have been possible).
  - rocky1138 8y ago
    The Atari Jaguar also had a GPU, and this was in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar#Processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar#Processors
    - garmaine 8y ago
      It had a "Tom" chip. The question is to whether they called it a GPU. I think they called it DSP back then. Even 3Dfx, the chief competitor to NVIDIA, made “graphics cards” or “3D accelerators” not “GPUs”. At least in that fight NVIDIA used the GPU term first, to emphasize that hey did transformation and lightning as well as rasterization. Although it wasn’t until a few generations later with the first register programmed GeForce architectures that we had anything resembling what we call GPUs today.
      - mrpippy 8y ago
        The original GeForce had hardware transform and lighting (T&L), but lacked FSAA. The Voodoo5, vice-versa. In a parallel universe where 3dfx survived and thrived, maybe they would be defining FSAA to be an important part of the first modern "GPU"
        garmaine 8y ago
        No, that's kinda a dead-end evolutionary pathway. 3dfx's "FSAA" was, essentially, render at 4x the resolution and down-sample at the DAC. Sure, that works, but about the only thing it does is FSAA or motion blur (but not both, selectively). Register-programmed T&L on the other hand was the first programmable SIMD shader pathway. After Stanford showed[1] somewhat remarkably in 2000-2001 that it was powerful enough to be the target of a RenderMan-like shader language, it pushed architectures towards full programmability. Now we think of the "GPU" as a vector processing unit able to run arbitrary kernels across massively parallel data sets, with high bandwidth connections to its own high-speed RAM. The fact this is useful for real time graphics rendering is almost incidental, as TFA demonstrates. That whole revolution, and the impact it had on scientific compute, machine learning, and much else, began with the first register-programmable GeForce (the GeForce 2 I believe? But Wikipedia says the GeForce 256 supported the same architectural feature, but was just not user accessible). [1] https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shading/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shading/ Although pursuing the website it looks like it was a general OpenGL 1.1 pipeline, rather than using the NVIDIA extensions as I remember. However these were translated by NVIDIA's driver into register presets for the hardware T&L engine.
      - rocky1138 8y ago
        Here is a link to the technical manual to the Jaguar, written for and distributed to developers in 1992: https://www.hillsoftware.com/files/atari/jaguar/jag_v8.pdf https://www.hillsoftware.com/files/atari/jaguar/jag_v8.pdf A search indicates many uses of the GPU term.

aidenn0 8y ago

That's only mildly off-putting to me since nvidia marketing invented the term GPU.

0xcde4c3db 8y ago
They definitely popularized it, but they didn't invent it. The graphics chip of the PlayStation was referred to as the "GPU" at least as far back as 1995, and I don't think NVIDIA had any involvement in its development or marketing (although the company was founded early enough for that to have been possible).
- rocky1138 8y ago
  The Atari Jaguar also had a GPU, and this was in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar#Processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar#Processors
  - garmaine 8y ago
    It had a "Tom" chip. The question is to whether they called it a GPU. I think they called it DSP back then. Even 3Dfx, the chief competitor to NVIDIA, made “graphics cards” or “3D accelerators” not “GPUs”. At least in that fight NVIDIA used the GPU term first, to emphasize that hey did transformation and lightning as well as rasterization. Although it wasn’t until a few generations later with the first register programmed GeForce architectures that we had anything resembling what we call GPUs today.
    - mrpippy 8y ago
      The original GeForce had hardware transform and lighting (T&L), but lacked FSAA. The Voodoo5, vice-versa. In a parallel universe where 3dfx survived and thrived, maybe they would be defining FSAA to be an important part of the first modern "GPU"
      - garmaine 8y ago
        No, that's kinda a dead-end evolutionary pathway. 3dfx's "FSAA" was, essentially, render at 4x the resolution and down-sample at the DAC. Sure, that works, but about the only thing it does is FSAA or motion blur (but not both, selectively). Register-programmed T&L on the other hand was the first programmable SIMD shader pathway. After Stanford showed[1] somewhat remarkably in 2000-2001 that it was powerful enough to be the target of a RenderMan-like shader language, it pushed architectures towards full programmability. Now we think of the "GPU" as a vector processing unit able to run arbitrary kernels across massively parallel data sets, with high bandwidth connections to its own high-speed RAM. The fact this is useful for real time graphics rendering is almost incidental, as TFA demonstrates. That whole revolution, and the impact it had on scientific compute, machine learning, and much else, began with the first register-programmable GeForce (the GeForce 2 I believe? But Wikipedia says the GeForce 256 supported the same architectural feature, but was just not user accessible). [1] https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shading/ https://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shading/ Although pursuing the website it looks like it was a general OpenGL 1.1 pipeline, rather than using the NVIDIA extensions as I remember. However these were translated by NVIDIA's driver into register presets for the hardware T&L engine.
    - rocky1138 8y ago
      Here is a link to the technical manual to the Jaguar, written for and distributed to developers in 1992: https://www.hillsoftware.com/files/atari/jaguar/jag_v8.pdf https://www.hillsoftware.com/files/atari/jaguar/jag_v8.pdf A search indicates many uses of the GPU term.