Graphics processing units in the context of Motherboard

In computing and computer science, a processor or processing unit is an electrical component (digital circuit) that performs operations on an external data source, usually memory or some other data stream. The term is frequently used to refer to the central processing unit (CPU), the main processor in a system. It can also refer to other specialized processors such as graphics processing units (GPU), quantum processing units (QPU), and digital signal processors (DSP). The design and development of a processor is intricate and time-consuming because it requires defining both its functional requirements (operations it must perform) and its non-functional requirements (the physical and performance constraints).

A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through the eyes of the main character. This genre shares multiple common traits with other shooter games, and in turn falls under the action games category. Since the genre's inception, advanced 3D and pseudo-3D graphics have proven fundamental to allow a reasonable level of immersion in the game world, and this type of game helped pushing technology progressively further, challenging hardware developers worldwide to introduce numerous innovations in the field of graphics processing units. Multiplayer gaming has been an integral part of the experience and became even more prominent with the diffusion of internet connectivity in recent years.

Although earlier games predate it by 20 years, Wolfenstein 3D (1992) was the highest-profile archetype upon which most subsequent first-person shooters were based. One such game, considered the progenitor of the genre's mainstream acceptance and popularity, was Doom (1993), often cited as the most influential game in this category; for years, the term "Doom clone" was used to designate this type of game, due to Doom's enormous success. Another common name for the genre in its early days was "corridor shooter", since processing limitations of that era's computer hardware meant that most of the action had to take place in enclosed areas, such as corridors and small rooms.

Processor design is a subfield of computer engineering and electronics that deals with creating a processor, a key component of computer hardware. While historically focused on the central processing unit (CPU), modern design often involves system-on-chip (SoC) architectures, which integrate multiple processing units such as CPUs, graphics processing units (GPUs), and neural processing units (NPUs) onto a single die or set of chiplets.

The design process involves choosing an instruction set and a certain execution paradigm (e.g. VLIW or RISC) and results in a microarchitecture, which might be described in e.g. VHDL or Verilog. For microprocessor design, this description is then manufactured employing some of the various semiconductor device fabrication processes, resulting in a die which is bonded onto a chip carrier. This chip carrier is then soldered onto, or inserted into a socket on, a printed circuit board (PCB).

CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated general-purpose processing, significantly broadening their utility in scientific and high-performance computing. CUDA was created by Nvidia starting in 2004 and was officially released in 2007. When it was first introduced, the name was an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but Nvidia later dropped the common use of the acronym and now rarely expands it.

CUDA is both a software layer that manages data, giving direct access to the GPU and CPU as necessary, and a library of APIs that enable parallel computation for various needs. In addition to drivers and runtime kernels, the CUDA platform includes compilers, libraries and developer tools to help programmers accelerate their applications.