I feel like the name’s been funny for a decade and a half, and a new name might be coming, but GPU has been pretty synonymous with massively parallel vector/SIMD processor for a long time, right? Most still have some dedicated graphics functionality, but people have also been using them for high performance headless compute for quite a while. I certainly prefer just GPU over GPGPU. It seems hard to change though, and might be confusing to call it a vector processor, considering CPUs have vector/SIMD support. So what would be a better name?

Well there are definitely cases where you want to render frames and not view them in real time. For example, rendering the final cut of an animated movie.

It's only a matter of time before GPU gets backronym-ed to General Processing Unit or something similarly wacky.

Like a “tensor processing unit” or TPU?

A RISC-V open source TPU would be a big innovation in AI and scientific computing.

GPPU