What their prototype still lacked was the extra processing power needed to analyze all that data. In Toronto, Hinton made use of a very particular kind of computer chip called a GPU, or graphics processing unit. Silicon Valley chip makers like Nvidia originally designed these chips as a way of quickly rendering graphics for popular video games like Halo and Grand Theft Auto, but somewhere along the way, deep learning researchers realized GPUs were equally adept at running the math that underpinned neural networks. In 2005, three engineers had tinkered with the idea inside the same Microsoft
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