Hands-On GPU Computing with Python

What is a GPU?

A GPU, as the initialism suggests, is an electronic circuit that serves as a processor for handling graphical information to output on a display. The scope of this book is to go beyond just handling graphical information and stepping into the general purpose computing with GPUs (GPGPU) arena. GPGPU is all about the use of what is typically performed with central processing units (CPUs), which we are going to discuss in detail in the next section. The terms GPU and graphics card are used interchangeably very frequently. But both are in fact quite different. The graphics card is a platform that serves as an interface to the GPU. Just like a CPU is seated over a motherboard socket, a GPU is seated over a socket on the graphics ...