However, new hardware was also crucial to this change, and it came from a surprising source: the computer games industry. The central feature of a computer is the CPU, or central processing unit. This includes one or a few ‘cores’, which do the calculations, and lots of cache memory. For most tasks this is fine, but the games industry found that in creating realistic, apparently three-dimensional images, it needed a different type of chip: one with hundreds of cores that can handle hundreds of software threads at a time. This ‘graphics processing unit’, or GPU, does not replace the CPU but it
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