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

Compared with a commercial GPU running the same image-denoising task, the optical system delivered more than a hundred times faster inference while using only about one-ninth of the computational resources. — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 13 July 2026

If the project was split across separate high-end GPU nodes for each minute of the movie, the entire film could be rendered in under ten minutes. — Caroline Reid, Forbes.com, 10 July 2026

SpaceX is quickly becoming a conglomerate, with its GPU clusters and AI model Grok competing for capital and attention with its rocket system. — Liz Hoffman, semafor.com, 9 July 2026

That will be especially true if GPU makers choose to start stacking HBM atop their already hot processors to boost bandwidth instead of placing them beside the processor. — IEEE Spectrum, 8 July 2026

Word History

Etymology

graphics processing unit

First Known Use

1973, in the meaning defined above