GPU

abbreviation or noun

ˌjē-(ˌ)pē-ˈyü 

variants or less commonly gpu

plural GPUs also gpus

: a specialized CPU designed to efficiently perform calculations for generating computer graphics

A GPU can deliver hundreds of billions of operations per second—some GPUs more than a teraflop, or a trillion operations per second—while requiring only slightly more electrical power and cooling than a CPU.

—Andrea Di Blas et al.

Examples of GPU in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

With Nvidia making up over 80% of the global GPU semiconductor market, the company will likely continue to ride high in the foreseeable future, Clinton said. —Sasha Rogelberg, Fortune, 16 July 2024

Arm claims that the ASR upscaling tech has been tuned to reduce GPU usage and to run well on devices without a ton of memory bandwidth—think low-power mobile GPUs with integrated graphics rather than desktop-class graphics cards. —Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica, 11 July 2024

The training of the entire human-exoskeleton system with all three neural networks took roughly eight hours on a single RTX 3090 GPU. —Jacek Krywko, Ars Technica, 1 July 2024

Blender doesn’t detect Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, so everything hits the CPU instead. —Tom Warren, The Verge, 26 June 2024

Word History

Etymology

graphics processing unit

First Known Use

1973, in the meaning defined above