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
    63·
    19 hours 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.