Whats a better name for 'graphics cards' that describes the kind of computational work it does
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Carburator.
It mixes the fuel/air ratio, prepping it before it goes into the engine.
Similarly ram is holding data while it gets adjusted.
It's not a great analogy, but it's pretty much all there is
I think you need to add the exhaust or at least the catalysator to it because the RAM stores the results of the computations for further use.
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Massively Parallelized Floating-Point Computation Unit.
MPFPCU!
Hehehehehehehe!
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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?
matrix multiplication unit
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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?
Floating point coprocessor
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I think you need to add the exhaust or at least the catalysator to it because the RAM stores the results of the computations for further use.
It's mixing the data that goes in to get the result...
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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?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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.
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matrix multiplication unit
We already have MMU for Memory Management Unit. Maybe Matrix Multiplication Accelerator instead?
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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?
Parallel compute accelerator.
Nobody is gonna say that in full, just like "graphics processing unit" becomes "GPU", so maybe "PCA".
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We already have MMU for Memory Management Unit. Maybe Matrix Multiplication Accelerator instead?
So MMA? Sounds sporty.
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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?
Back in the day, you could slap a math coprocessor on your system so it could do floating point maths real gud.
Now, you slap in some card that does floating point maths even guder, but also in parallel in yuge vectors.
So my proposed name is "It's like an old Cray supercomputer but real tiny"
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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?
Thinky boi, or computy boi.
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Parallel compute accelerator.
Nobody is gonna say that in full, just like "graphics processing unit" becomes "GPU", so maybe "PCA".
Pissy, eh.
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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.
The 5090 is missing rops too
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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?
Floating point processor.
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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?
Mathematical Image Creation Engine.
MICE.
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Parallel compute accelerator.
Nobody is gonna say that in full, just like "graphics processing unit" becomes "GPU", so maybe "PCA".
Aka ones 'pecca'
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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?
Computational shotgun.
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It's mixing the data that goes in to get the result...
Well there's yer problem
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Thinky boi, or computy boi.
Thinky boi is the CPU. GPU are also thinky but they are in parallel so plural. Thinky bois.
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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?
AIPU. Or “AI stinks” for short.
