GeForce 256
NVIDIA released a chip it called the world’s first graphics processing unit: transform, lighting and triangle rendering on a single chip for the first time.
Why it matters
The hardware AlexNet was trained on thirteen years later arrived on the market as a games accelerator.
The chip moved transform and lighting off the central processor onto blocks of its own and rendered four pixels per clock. It sold for games, but the idea itself, a separate processor in which many identical simple blocks work over an array at once, turned out in later generations to be what matrix multiplication needs. Researchers began adapting graphics processors for computation around 2004, and CUDA in 2007 made it accessible without graphics tricks.