I've been reading about the history of GPU computing in chapter 2 of "Massively Parallel Processors" by David B. Kirk and Wen-mei W. Hwu. It's a fascinating story of how the GPU came to be used for general-purpose computing.

The story begins in the 1990s, when the first consumer 3D graphics cards were being developed. These cards were designed to accelerate the rendering of 3D graphics for video games. They were able to do this by offloading the rendering work from the CPU to the GPU, which was specifically designed for this task.

The first GPUs were fixed-function, meaning that they could only perform a limited set of operations. However, as the demand for more realistic and complex graphics grew, the capabilities of the GPU were expanded. This led to the development of programmable shaders, which allowed developers to write custom code to control the rendering process. In the beginning, these shaders were still limited to graphics-related tasks and there were different kinds, such as vertex shaders and pixel shaders.

One of the questions I …