Historical GPU 'NVIDIA NV 20' which opened up the future such as AI development as well as game

As trends of supercomputers place importance on GPU , GPU is used not only in graphics of games and movies but also in fields such as AI development and weather forecasting. It is said that the code name " NV 20 " developed by NVIDIA once made the chance to push the GPU to the leading role of computing.

Chip Hall of Fame: Nvidia NV 20 - IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/chip-hall-of-fame-nvidia-nv20

"Game" and "Animation" can be cited as existence which raises graphic drawing skill from long ago. In 1995 Pixar showed the possibility of computer animation by digitally making Toy Story in full scale. The animation of Toy Story is produced by rendering each frame individually and joining it together, but such a technique does not apply in the world of games. In the game, it is necessary to draw various scenes according to commands and situations, so real-time rendering is required.

Since the 1970s video games have made remarkable progress on a daily basis with the evolution of computers. With the PC game market rising, NVIDIA also sent the GeForce series to the world as a chip called "GPU" appeared compared to the CPU, and the competition with rival 3dfx was settled.

When winning in the battle against 3dfx, NVIDIA began to develop a product called codename "NV20" newly. At that time NVIDIA included the "optimized" route of changing the GeForce 2 series GPU of the past more efficiently to enhance performance and the "ambitious" route of newly developing completely new functions It was said that there was a choice of kind. In an ambitious program, it seems that technology which game developers may not use was also included.

In the end, NVIDIA chose an ambitious path with the possibility of achieving higher performance, and the development policy of NV 20 was decided. What was first addressed at NV 20 was that the memory partitioning method was changed. By dividing 128-bit data into four 32-bit data, we created a process to efficiently fetch memory data. In addition, a system called "z-cull" was adopted that predicts objects hidden by other objects in the 3D scene to reduce rendering processing. In order to realize these changes, NVIDIA is working on miniaturization technology which is difficult process rule 150 nm.

In addition to these changes, NVIDIA has changed the NV 20 to a programmable one, so that game developers can change pixel shaders and vertex shaders . NVIDA made the first on-board function that game developers can set with NV 20, although it was not completely programmable by developers.

In this way NV 20 was released as "GeForce 3" and released, it was decided to be adopted in Microsoft's first Xbox as a custom chip besides graphic board for PC games.

From the long-term perspective, it seems that NVIDIA's decision seems to have spread as a custom chip for Xbox in the short term, but from the long-term point of view, "NVIDIA decided to open the door to using GPU for non-graphic purposes "IEEE Spectrum says. The GeForce 3 or later NVIDIA GPU will continue to provide programmability, and as a result, developers have started "GPU hacking" for their own purposes. This seems to have led to the use of the GPU for scientific technical calculation such as training of machine learning algorithm and prediction of climate change.

The foundation on which GPU 's function called Game Graphics can be applied to various computing technologies seems to have been told that NVIDIA introduced room for custom program which NVIDIA introduced in the development of NV 20 .