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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

I believe the distinction from NVIDIA was that they considered their product as the first all in one graphics unit

> a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second

It’s kind of arbitrary, even when you take out the processing rate. But prior to that there was still a significant amount of work expected to be done on the CPU before feeding the GPU.

That said, the term GPU did definitely exist before NVIDIA, though not meaning the same thing we use it for today.

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TI chips for arcades are considered one of the first.

"The TMS34010, developed by Texas Instruments and released in 1986, was the first programmable graphics processor integrated circuit. While specialized graphics hardware existed earlier, such as blitters, the TMS34010 chip is a microprocessor which includes graphics-oriented instructions, making it a combination of a CPU and what would later be called a GPU."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

And they weren't alone in the history of graphics hardware.

Yep, and I think perhaps that’s where folks are getting hung up.

NVIDIA didn’t invent the GPU. They coined the modern term “graphics processing unit”. Prior to that, various hardware existed but went by other expanded names or don’t fully match NVIDIAs arbitrary definition, which is what we use today.

IBM's PGA card had an additional 8088 dedicated to graphics primitives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Graphics_Controll...

basically with all those bells and whistles (transform, lighting, clipping, shaders, etc, etc)

the "old way" was to engineer a bit of silicon for each one of those things, custom-like. problem was how much silicon to give to teach feature, it almost has to be fine-tuned to each individual game, a problem

So nvidia comes up with the idea to sort of have a pool of generic compute units, each of which can do T&L, or shading, etc. Now the problem of fine-tuning to a game is solved. but also now you have a mini compute array that can do math fast, a general-purpose unit of processing (GPU-OP), which was a nod from NVIDIA to the gaming community (OP - overpowered)

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