Graphics Processing Unit
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. Originally developed for rendering graphics in video games and computer graphics, modern GPUs are highly parallel processors optimized for handling large blocks of data simultaneously, making them efficient for a wide range of computational tasks beyond graphics. They consist of thousands of smaller, more efficient cores designed for multitasking, in contrast to CPUs which have fewer cores optimized for sequential serial processing.
Developers should learn about GPUs when working on applications that require massive parallel processing, such as real-time 3D rendering in games, video editing, scientific simulations, and machine learning model training. For example, in deep learning, frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch leverage GPUs to accelerate matrix operations, significantly reducing training times for neural networks. Additionally, GPUs are essential for high-performance computing (HPC) tasks in fields like climate modeling, financial analysis, and cryptography, where parallel data processing is critical for efficiency.