What is the GPU on a computer?

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles.


What does a GPU do?

GPU became a popular term for the component that powers graphics on a machine in the 1990s, when it was coined by chip manufacturer Nvidia. The company's GeForce range of graphics cards were the first to be popularised and ensured related technologies such as hardware acceleration, programmable shading and stream processing were able to evolve.

In short, a GPU is a processor that is specially-designed to handle intensive graphics rendering tasks.


GPU companies

Many companies have produced GPUs under a number of brand names. In 2009,Intel,Nvidia and AMD/ANT were the market share leaders, with 49.4%, 27.8% and 20.6% market share respectively. However, those numbers include Intel's integrated graphics solutions as GPUs. Not counting those,  AMD control nearly 100% of the market as of 2018. Their respective market shares are 66% and 33%.In addition, S3 Graphics and Matrox produce GPUs. Modern Imagination technologies  and Mali GPUs from ARM smartphones also use mostly Adreno GPUs from Qualcomm, PowerVR GPUs from  Imagination Technologies and Mali GPU from ARM.

Components in a GPU

List of Intel graphics processing units

·        First generation. Main article: Intel740

·        Second generation. Intel marketed its second generation using the brand Extreme Graphics. These chips added support for...

·        Third generation. Third generation consists of integrated graphics processing units with DirectX 9 support. Even though...

·        Gen4. The last generation of motherboard integrated graphics. Each EU has a 128-bit wide FPU that natively executes four...

·        Gen5. Integrated graphics chip moved from motherboard into the processor.

·        PowerVR based.

Example of GPU in mobile:

Adreno is a series of graphics processing unit (GPU) semiconductor intellectual property cores developed by Qualcomm and used in a variety of their SoCs . Adreno (an anagram of AMD 's graphics-brand Radeon) started out as Qualcomm 's inhouse brand of graphics technologies, and was used in their mobile chipset products.

CPU VS GPU


What is graphic card:
Graphics card is also known as display card, video card etc. It is an expansion card in the device that generates images to display on an output device such as a computer monitor. The graphics card is made in the form of a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) and can be integrated to the motherboard.



Difference between GPU and graphics card

Is GPU and graphic card same?

The main difference between GPU and Graphic Card is that the GPU is the unit in the graphics card that performs the actual processing of the images and graphics while the graphics card is an expansion card in the device that generates images to display on the output device. ... GPU is a unit located in the graphics card.