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?

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
    66·
    3 days ago

    They are GPUs.

    All of them, even the H100, B100, and MI300X all have texture units, pixel shaders, everything. They are graphics cards at a low level. Only the MI300X is missing ROPs, but the Nvidia cards have them (and can run realtime games on Linux), and they all can be used in Blender and such.

    The compute programming languages they use are, fundamentally, hacked up abstractions to map to the same GPU hardware in consumer stuff.

    That’s the whole point, they’re architected as GPUs so that they’re backwards compatible, as everything’s built on the days when consumer gaming GPUs were hacked to be used for compute.

    Are there more dedicated accelerators? Yes. They’re called ASICs, or application specific integrated circuits. This is technically a broad term, but mostly its connotation is very purpose made compute.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    35·
    3 days ago

    Parallel compute accelerator.

    Nobody is gonna say that in full, just like “graphics processing unit” becomes “GPU”, so maybe “PCA”.

  • Yardy Sardley@lemmy.ca
    9·
    2 days ago

    GPUs are specialized to be able to very quickly manipulate vectors, by using a principle called Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD). Where a CPU would have to individually operate on each element of a vector, a GPU can operate on all the elements in one go.

    So maybe you could call it a SIMD card or Vector Accelerator or something like that.

  • m_f@discuss.onlineEnglish
    141·
    3 days ago

    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.

  • Rose@slrpnk.net
    7·
    3 days ago

    Back in the day, you could slap a math coprocessor on your system so it could do floating point maths real gud.

    Now, you slap in some card that does floating point maths even guder, but also in parallel in yuge vectors.

    So my proposed name is “It’s like an old Cray supercomputer but real tiny”

    • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
      171·
      3 days ago

      Not just crypto and AI fucktards tho.

      Theorethical physicists, astrophysicists, nuclear engineers, mechanical engineers, and countless other professions depend on the computational capabilities it provides.

      Don’t let your anger and bitterness blindside you into thinking it’s for all the bullshit.