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A Graphics Processing Unit or GPU, also called Visual Processing Unit or VPU is the microprocessor of a graphics card (or graphics accelerator). Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating and displaying computer graphics.
The name Graphics Processing Unit for this processor type was coined by NVIDIA Corporation, and for this reason, ATI coined their counter-term Visual Processing Unit.
The GPUs developed from the graphics chips. While early graphics chips would be relatively simple hardware units with simple memory mapped control ports and sometimes memory-mapped bitmaps, the graphics processing units introduced an independent programming capability, beginning with the BitBLT operation found in the Xerox Alto computer, and were initially called "blitters". Some, such as the Agnus chip found in the Commodore Amiga were called co-processors ("copper") and their programs, residing in the common RAM memory, were called "copper lists".
Typical operations of early GPU:s included moving a section of core memory to the video memory position it on the screen, and to handle independent graphics blocks, so-called "sprites". Nowadays, most of the bulk work of GPUs are processeing 3D computer graphics through rapid matrix multiplications.
GPU manufacturers
See also