Ask HN: What's new in GPUs since 80s? (technical details please)

Hi,

Can you please recommend a good resource teaching how CPU communicates with GPU.

A historical perspective is even better.

Let's take a historic computer... a ZX-Spectrum. It had a 6912 bytes of memory constantly scanned and outputted on TV. A program could just write to video memory and output will appear.

Since then a lot of responsibilities were moved into GPU. What are the data formats that are exchanged between CPU and GPU? How is the CPU signaling the GPU that needs to send some data? Where is the frame buffer siting? etc. etc.

... and also ... are all modern GPU architectures the same? ... or can we classify them based on some significant details?