Ask Lemmy

Triangle Vomitorium.

The computer that you stick into your other computer.

Strategic Computational Retro Offboard Turbo Encabulator

Parallel Processing Unit: PPU

I'm old enough to remember when these were called 'Accelerator Cards'.

GPUs are specialized to be able to very quickly manipulate vectors, by using a principle called Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD). Where a CPU would have to individually operate on each element of a vector, a GPU can operate on all the elements in one go.

So maybe you could call it a SIMD card or Vector Accelerator or something like that.

Ok you can call it a geometry coprocessor

Expensive card

Computational shotgun.

AIPU. Or “AI stinks” for short.

They are GPUs.

All of them, even the H100, B100, and MI300X all have texture units, pixel shaders, everything. They are graphics cards at a low level. Only the MI300X is missing ROPs, but the Nvidia cards have them (and can run realtime games on Linux), and they all can be used in Blender and such.

The compute programming languages they use are, fundamentally, hacked up abstractions to map to the same GPU hardware in consumer stuff.

That’s the whole point, they’re architected as GPUs so that they’re backwards compatible, as everything's built on the days when consumer gaming GPUs were hacked to be used for compute.

Are there more dedicated accelerators? Yes. They’re called ASICs, or application specific integrated circuits. This is technically a broad term, but mostly its connotation is very purpose made compute.

Parallel compute accelerator.

Nobody is gonna say that in full, just like "graphics processing unit" becomes "GPU", so maybe "PCA".

Thinky boi, or computy boi.

Mathematical Image Creation Engine.

MICE.

Floating point processor.

Back in the day, you could slap a math coprocessor on your system so it could do floating point maths real gud.

Now, you slap in some card that does floating point maths even guder, but also in parallel in yuge vectors.

So my proposed name is "It's like an old Cray supercomputer but real tiny"

Massively Parallelized Floating-Point Computation Unit.

MPFPCU!

Triangle makers

Floating point coprocessor

matrix multiplication unit

Probably something like Tensor Processing Unit. That's a specific Google product, but something along those lines

Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is an AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed by Google for neural network machine learning, using Google's own TensorFlow software. Google began using TPUs internally in 2015, and in 2018 made them available for third-party use, both as part of its cloud infrastructure and by offering a smaller version of the chip for sale.

Compared to a graphics processing unit, TPUs are designed for a high volume of low precision computation (e.g. as little as 8-bit precision)[3] with more input/output operations per joule, without hardware for rasterisation/texture mapping.

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