Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1.From Graphics Processing to General Purpose Parallel Computing Driven by the insatiable market demand for realtime,high-definition 3D graphics, the programmable Graphic Processor Unit or GPU has evolved into a highly parallel, multithreaded,manycore processor with tremendous computational horsepower and very high memory bandwidth,as illustrated by Figure 1 and Figure 2. Theoretical GFLOP/s at base clock 11000 10500 ◆-MDLA GPU Single Precision 10000 9500 9000 8500 8000 750 7000 6500 6000 500 350 2500 200 1500 500 0 2005 2007 2011 2013 2015 Figure 1 Floating-Point Operations per Second for the CPU and GPU www.nvidia.com CUDA C Programming Guide PG-02829-001_v8.011www.nvidia.com CUDA C Programming Guide PG-02829-001_v8.0 | 1 Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. From Graphics Processing to General Purpose Parallel Computing Driven by the insatiable market demand for realtime, high-definition 3D graphics, the programmable Graphic Processor Unit or GPU has evolved into a highly parallel, multithreaded, manycore processor with tremendous computational horsepower and very high memory bandwidth, as illustrated by Figure 1 and Figure 2. Figure 1 Floating-Point Operations per Second for the CPU and GPU