I now do some work with computers that involves making graphics cards do computational work on a headless server. The computational work it does has nothing to do with graphics.
The name is more for consumers based off the most common use for graphics cards and why they were first made in the 90s but now they’re used for all sorts of computational workloads. So what are some more fitting names for the part?
I now think of them as ‘computation engines’ analagous to a old car engine. Its where the computational horsepower is really generated. But how would ram make sense in this analogy?
The computer that you stick into your other computer.
Computer 2
Strategic Computational Retro Offboard Turbo Encabulator
Triangle Vomitorium.
Coincidentally the same name as my geometry themed experimental grunge rock band
Expensive card
AIPU. Or “AI stinks” for short.
Computational shotgun.
Mathematical Image Creation Engine.
MICE.
Ok you can call it a geometry coprocessor
GPU
Massively Parallelized Floating-Point Computation Unit.
MPFPCU!
deleted by creator
I’m old enough to remember when these were called ‘Accelerator Cards’.
F
How are your knees and back treating you, fellow old person?
My knees and back are fine
My wrists and fingers are war veterans
Parallel compute accelerator.
Nobody is gonna say that in full, just like “graphics processing unit” becomes “GPU”, so maybe “PCA”.
Pissy, eh.
Aka ones ‘pecca’
matrix multiplication unit
We already have MMU for Memory Management Unit. Maybe Matrix Multiplication Accelerator instead?
So MMA? Sounds sporty.
Matrix Accelerator coProcessor card, MAP card
Carburator.
It mixes the fuel/air ratio, prepping it before it goes into the engine.
Similarly ram is holding data while it gets adjusted.
It’s not a great analogy, but it’s pretty much all there is
I think you need to add the exhaust or at least the catalysator to it because the RAM stores the results of the computations for further use.
It’s mixing the data that goes in to get the result…
Well there’s yer problem
Parallel Processing Unit: PPU
heh, you said “PP”.
How the turntables
Nintendo called the 2d graphics chips on the NES and SNES the “PPU” (picture processing unit)
