GPU
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. Modern GPUs are highly parallel processors optimized for handling large blocks of data simultaneously, making them efficient not only for graphics rendering but also for general-purpose computing tasks (GPGPU). They are essential in fields like gaming, scientific simulations, machine learning, and video editing.
Developers should learn about GPUs when working on applications that require high-performance parallel computing, such as machine learning model training, real-time graphics rendering in games or simulations, and data-intensive scientific computations. Understanding GPU architecture and programming (e.g., using CUDA or OpenCL) allows developers to leverage their massive parallelism to significantly speed up computationally intensive tasks compared to CPUs, making them crucial for AI, big data analytics, and high-performance computing projects.