I now do some work with computers that involves making graphics cards do computational work on a headless server. The computational work it does has nothing to do with graphics.
The name is more for consumers based off the most common use for graphics cards and why they were first made in the 90s but now they’re used for all sorts of computational workloads. So what are some more fitting names for the part?
I now think of them as ‘computation engines’ analagous to a old car engine. Its where the computational horsepower is really generated. But how would ram make sense in this analogy?
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.
matrix multiplication unit
Massively Parallelized Floating-Point Computation Unit.
MPFPCU!
Hehehehehehehe!
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
I think you need to add the exhaust or at least the catalysator to it because the RAM stores the results of the computations for further use.
Graphics cards.
Crypto Cultists and AI Evangelists found a
wasteful and often uselessdifferent function for them.
