The many roles and names of the GPU

The original use and development for the GPU was to accelerate 3D games and rendering. The acceleration of the game’s 3D models involved geometry processing, matrix math, and sorting. Rendering involved polishing pixels and hiding some of them. Two distinctive, non-complimentary tasks, but both served admiralty by a high-speed parallel processor configured as a SIMD—same instruction, multiple data, architecture. The processors were used in shading applications and became known as Shaders. Those GPUs were applied to graphics add-in boards (AIBs) and served their users very well. It didn’t take long for the mass-produced GPU, which enjoyed the same economy of