If you are a PC gamer, you must be very familiar with the world of graphics cards. Depending on their specifications, you might also be familiar with how each of them would affect your gaming experience. Let's explore extensively what lies beyond that domain through the subsequent sections in this chapter.

A GPU, as the initialism suggests, is an electronic circuit that serves as a processor for handling graphical information to output on a display. The scope of this book is to go beyond just handling graphical information and stepping into the general purpose computing with GPUs (GPGPU) arena. GPGPU is all about the use of what is typically performed with central...

Before GPUs arrived, general-purpose computing, as we know it, was only possible with CPUs, which were the first mainstream processors manufactured for both consumers as well as advanced computing enthusiasts.

Both computational and graphical processing were handled only by them. This meant that both the tasks of processing and handling computation of input and showing its corresponding computed output on a display were all handled by a CPU.

The history of general-purpose computing goes way back to the 1950s, before GPUs arrived and revolutionized the concept. The 1970s witnessed the rise of a new era, when the first commercial CPU, the Intel 4004, was released by Intel in 1971. The first AMD CPU was also launched in the 70s with the launch of AM2900 in 1975. There was no looking back, and a new cycle of CPU manufacturing...

Gaming is over a $100 billion USD industry. But way back in the 1950s, video games were purely made for academic purposes. Video games were a medium to demonstrate the capabilities of a newly invented technology. They were also a good application to test AI applications through tic-tac-toe or chess. But access to such platforms was still limited to computer lab environments.

By the 1970s, the area of gaming started to change. Arcade gaming became very popular. The PC gaming landscape took proper shape in the 80s with programmable computers in almost every household equipped with popular games such as Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Prince of Persia, and more.

The 90s saw the emergence of legendary games such as Doom and Quake, which radically changed...

From the first GPUs to the most powerful GPUs seen today, GPUs continue to make a noticeable mark upon society with limitless applications, as we are going to see in the The social impact of GPUs section of this chapter. For now, let's look into how GPU specifications evolved since they became available at much reduced costs, since the rise of the gaming industry.

GPU computing has massively grown in the last two decades with the creation of GPU application programmable interfaces (APIs) such as Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) and OpenCL. These APIs allow the programmer to harness the parallel computational elements within the GPU.

Let's compare these two APIs:

Python is a programming language with syntax that is very easy to grasp and understand, especially for computational analysts from backgrounds other than computer science. Due to this reason, it is adopted quite whole-heartedly throughout the entire research community in the world. When we also consider the powerful computational capabilities of GPUs, a dual advantage is clearly noticeable, when combined with the simplistic nature of Python syntax.

The C language was created as a procedural and structured programming language, developed between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs by Dennis M. Ritchie. As...

NVIDIA RAPIDS is a very recent example of using an open source system to carry out research related to science, AI, and other fields. There are numerous examples of research work in science that has been empowered by GPU acceleration. Let's understand its significance through some of these amazing research examples.

The following research paper is discussed in this section: Managing Complex Workflows in Bioinformatics: An Interactive Toolkit With GPU Acceleration, A Welivita, I Perera, D Meedeniya, A Wickramarachchi, V Mallawaarachchi (2018), IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience, 17(3), 199-208, doi:10.1109/tnb.2018.2837122.

BioWorkflow...

Big data is everywhere and so datasets are also everywhere, meaning that GPUs and AI can be applied to any other computational field. Since we have already discussed how GPUs can contribute in science and AI, let's read about some more examples in other fields that reveal more about how GPUs can contribute to our society.

We are going to discuss some diverse fields here, but, of course, there are no limits!

The following research paper is discussed in this section: Automated GPU-Based Surface Morphology Reconstruction of Volume Data for Archaeology, D Jungblut, S Karl, H Mara, S Krömker, G Wittum (2012), Contributions in Mathematical and Computational...

In this chapter, we learned about the basic concepts behind GPU computing, the history behind its evolution, and its scope of use in diverse fields. We also learned about the simplicity of Python syntax and why this simplicity can be of great significance when harnessing GPUs for computational work. In the final section, we looked at the uses of GPU applications beyond just science and AI, and we looked at various fields, such as archaeology, weather, music, sports, art, security, agriculture, and economics.

If you are a gamer and/or a computing enthusiast, from now on, you will be able to better understand the computational aspect of GPUs and Python code. The various fields of applications that were discussed in the later sections of this chapter will now allow you to have a general idea about the limitless areas in which you can create your own GPU applications. GPU...

You can read the following research papers and articles to gain more knowledge about the topics that were discussed in this chapter:

• How video games became a $100-billion industry, J Desjardins (2017), (online) Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-history-and-evolution-of-the-video-games-market-2017-1
• Global Games Market Revenues 2018 | Per Region and Segment, T Wijman (2018), (online) Newzoo: https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-reaches-137-9-billion-in-2018-mobile-games-take-half/
• INFOGRAPHIC: A History Of Gaming, PC Tech Magazine (2018) (online): https://pctechmag.com/2018/03/infographic-a-history-of-gaming/
• BMW and NVIDIA DRIVE partnership (online): https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/self-driving-cars/partners/bmw/
• Nvidia Jetson TK1 vs TX1 for autonomous road sign recognition, Antmicro.com (2016) (online): https://antmicro.com...