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Accelerated processing unit

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Someone not using his real name (talk | contribs) at 21:43, 13 January 2014 (a quick perusal of reliable sources shows that this basically an AMD term for GPGPU in CPU, not the pile of rubbish presented herein from obscure blogs). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

An Accelerated Processing Unit (APU, also Advanced Processing Unit) is a computer's main processing unit that includes additional processing capability designed to accelerate one or more types of computations outside of a central processing unit (CPU). This may include a graphics processing unit (GPU) used for general-purpose computing (GPGPU), a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), or similar specialized processing system. Variations on the usage of this term include a variation in which the APU is described as a processing device which integrates a CPU and an OpenCL compatible GPU on the same die, thus improving data transfer rates between these components while reducing power consumption by upwards of 50% with current technology over traditional architecture.[1] APUs can also include video processing and other application-specific accelerators. Examples include AMD Accelerated Processing Unit, Cell, Intel HD Graphics, and NVIDIA's Project Denver.

The term accelerated processing unit was first used in a public context with respect to accelerated computing in 2006,[2] and prior to that in various presentations and business plans written by Joe Landman[3] of Scalable Informatics. Other uses include Xilinx using the term for an auxiliary processor unit.

See also

References

  1. ^ "What is an APU?", Net flow developments (World Wide Web log entry), 2012-05-03, retrieved 2014-01-13
  2. ^ "Accelerator Processor Units (APUs) for non-scientific applications". Scalability. Retrieved 23 November 2011.
  3. ^ "About me". scalability.org. Retrieved 2014-01-13.
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