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A GPU, or graphics processing unit, is a chip with thousands of small cores that do the same calculation on many numbers at once. Built to draw video game images, it turned out to be ideal for artificial intelligence, and today's GPUs perform trillions of calculations a second.

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Nvidia marketed its GeForce 256, released in 1999, as the first GPU. Drawing a game frame means working out the colour of millions of pixels with similar maths, so GPUs were built to do many simple sums side by side, rather than a few complex ones in turn as a computer's main processor (CPU) does. In 2007 Nvidia released CUDA, software that let programmers use GPUs for any kind of calculation. The turning point for AI came in 2012. AlexNet, a neural network (a program, loosely modelled on the brain, that learns from examples) trained by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton on two gaming GPUs in Krizhevsky's bedroom, won the ImageNet image-recognition contest by a wide margin. Training an AI model means repeating the same kinds of multiplication billions of times, exactly the work GPUs do best.

Türkçe oku
GPU, yani grafik işlem birimi, içindeki binlerce küçük çekirdekle aynı hesabı pek çok sayı üzerinde aynı anda yapan bir çiptir. Video oyunlarının görüntülerini oluşturmak için tasarlandı, ama yapay zekâ için biçilmiş kaftan olduğu anlaşıldı. Günümüzün GPU'ları saniyede trilyonlarca işlem yapabiliyor.

Nvidia, 1999'da piyasaya sürdüğü GeForce 256'yı “ilk GPU” diye tanıttı. Bir oyun karesini çizmek, milyonlarca pikselin rengini benzer hesaplarla bulmak demektir. Bu yüzden GPU'lar, bilgisayarın ana işlemcisi (CPU) gibi az sayıda karmaşık işi sırayla yapmak yerine çok sayıda basit işlemi yan yana yapacak biçimde tasarlandı. Nvidia 2007'de, programcıların GPU'ları her türlü hesap için kullanabilmesini sağlayan CUDA yazılımını yayımladı. Yapay zekâda dönüm noktası 2012'de geldi: AlexNet adlı yapay sinir ağı, ImageNet görüntü tanıma yarışmasını açık farkla kazandı. Yapay sinir ağı, beynin işleyişinden kabaca esinlenen ve örneklerden öğrenen bir programdır. AlexNet'i Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever ve Geoffrey Hinton, oyuncular için üretilmiş iki ekran kartıyla Krizhevsky'nin yatak odasında eğitmişti. Bir yapay zekâ modelini eğitmek, aynı türden çarpma işlemlerini milyarlarca kez tekrarlamak demektir; GPU'ların en iyi yaptığı iş de budur.

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Background reading: Graphics processing unit
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