History and Evolution of GPU Architecture A Paper Survey

The graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized and highly parallel microprocessor designed to offload and accelerate 2D or 3D rendering from the central processing unit (CPU). GPUs can be found in a wide range of systems, from desktops and laptops to mobile phones and super computers [3]. This paper provides a summary of the history and evolution of GPU hardware architecture. The information in this paper, while being slightly NVIDIA biased, is presented as a set of milestones noting major architectural shifts and trends in GPU hardware. The evolution of GPU hardware architecture has gone from a specific single core, fixed function hardware pipeline implementation made solely for graphics, to a set of highly parallel and programmable cores for more general purpose computation. The trend in GPU technology has no doubt been to keep adding more programmability and parallelism to a GPU core architecture that is ever evolving towards a general purpose more CPU-like core. Future GPU generations will look more and more like wide-vector general purpose CPUs, and eventually both will be seamlessly combined as one.