GPUs: Designed for gaming now crucial to HPC and AI
It’s rare to see a processor find great success outside of the area it was intended for, but that’s exactly what has happened to the graphics processing unit (GPU). A chip originally intended to speed up gaming graphics and nothing more now powers everything from Adobe Premier and databases to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).
GPUs are now offered in servers from every major OEM plus off-brand vendors like Supermicro, but they aren’t doing graphics acceleration. That’s because the GPU is in essence a giant math co-processor, now being used to perform computation-intensive work ranging from 3D simulations to medical imaging to financial modeling