He understood that everyone on the network was trying to win the computational race with the central processing unit, or CPU, in his or her computer. But the CPU was also running most of the computer’s other basic systems, so it was not particularly efficient at computing hash functions. The graphics processing unit, or GPU, on the other hand, was custom-designed to do the kind of repetitive problem solving necessary to process images and video—similar to what was needed to win the hash race function.
