alt Hacker NewsYeah, never thought I'd say this but I think I agree with the marketing guys here. I guess there's a first time for everything.
"Graphics Processing Unit" was purely a marketing term at the time. I mean, there's no lies there. It was a unit, and it processed graphics. It doesn't claim any specific sort of processing capability. If Nintendo had invented that term in 1985 I wouldn't have seen anything wrong with them calling the NES' video chip a "GPU."
Of course today "GPU" has a pretty specific meaning. It basically inherited the meaning from the clunky outdated term "GPGPU."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...
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> If Nintendo had invented that term in 1985 I wouldn't have seen anything wrong with them calling the NES' video chip a "GPU."
I mean, they basically did, just one letter off. The NES had a “PPU”, or pixel processing unit. Basically the same thing.
"The first video card called a GPU by a marketing department"
No one objected to calling an 80387 or a Weitek chip an "FPU", even though those chips just had simple stack and register interfaces. So I don't think a good case can be made for refusing to label anything from the original Voodoo card forward as a "GPU."