GPUs haven't been developed in a vacuum, they were mostly created to accelerate rendering for 3D games, and 3D rendering is mostly about vector operations in up

GPUs haven't been developed in a vacuum, they were mostly created to accelerate rendering for 3D games, and 3D rendering is mostly about vector operations in up to 4 dimensions (to process points and vectors in 3D space, and pixels in an RGB+transparency 'color space'). The other interesting property of 3D rendering is that it is an 'embarrassingly parallel' problem. Vertices or pixels (mostly) don't depend on each other, so the GPU can process them in parallel. That's how GPUs turned over time into big arrays of very simple cores which are good at running a huge number of vector operations in parallel.