To programmer_dude’s point, compute center GPUs don’t have hardware for the rasterisation stage, which is a particularly inflexible bit of the graphics pipeline

To programmer_dude’s point, compute center GPUs don’t have hardware for the rasterisation stage, which is a particularly inflexible bit of the graphics pipeline. Omitting it and emphasising the geometry (matrix multiplication) capabilties is meant to give it more flexibility/less of a strongly-opinionated graphics focus. As for the “GPU” term, it’s a bit of a historical relic, presently it serves as a useful indicator of compute hardware (in contrast to CPU and Google’s TPU.) Nvidia itself calls its A100 a “Tensor Core GPU.”