What is a GPU and how does it work?

What is a GPU and how does it work? 

1 From Youtube: 

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_TN845dxUU&t=6s点击打开链接

2 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia：

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit点击打开链接

A graphics processing unit (GPU), occasionally called visual processing unit (VPU), 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.

Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating computer graphics and image processing, and their highly parallel structure makes them more efficient than general-purpose CPUs for algorithms where the processing of large blocks of data is done in parallel. 

Modern GPUs use most of their transistors to do calculations related to 3D computer graphics. They were initially used to accelerate the memory-intensive(内存密集型) work of texture mapping（纹理映射） and rendering polygons（渲染多边形）, later adding units to accelerate geometric calculations such as the rotation and translation of vertices into different coordinate systems. （顶点旋转和平移到不同坐标系）

Recent developments in GPUs include support for programmable shaders which can manipulate vertices and textures with many of the same operations supported by CPUs, oversampling and interpolation techniques to reduce aliasing, and very high-precision color spaces. 

(GPU的最新发展包括支持可编程着色器，可以通过CPU支持的许多相同操作，过采样和内插技术来操纵顶点和纹理，以减少混叠和非常高精度的色彩空间。）

Because most of these computations involve matrix and vector operations, engineers and scientists have increasingly studied the use of GPUs for non-graphical calculations; they are especially suited to other embarrassingly parallel problems.

The position of an integrated GPU in a northbridge/southbridge system layout：

GPU vs CPU Performance

http://www.nvidia.com/object/what-is-gpu-computing.html点击打开链接

A simple way to understand the difference between a GPU and a CPU is to compare how they process tasks. A CPU consists of a few cores optimized for sequential serial processing while a GPU has a massively parallel architecture consisting of thousands of smaller, more efficient cores designed for handling multiple tasks simultaneously.

an entertaining GPU versus CPU:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P28LKWTzrI点击打开链接