Imagination had previously been more successful at licensing graphics processing unit (GPU) designs.

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The Cray XK7 system contains 18, 688 nodes, with each holding a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator.

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The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has been enhanced in a number of ways, principally to allow for easier use of the GPU for general purpose computing (GPGPU) such as physics simulation.

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Qualcomm, which has a long history of providing technology to cellphone manufacturers, likes to emphasize its experience and expertise in the mobile device industry while Nvidia points to sophisticated technology and engineering that it brought over from its graphics processing unit (GPU) business.

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The graphics processing unit (GPU) "has become a much more important processor in a system than it was just a few years ago, when everything was 2-D in nature, " says Sam Blackman, chief executive of Elemental Technologies, a company that builds video-processing software that runs on Nvidia's gear.

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By contrast an Nvidia graphics processing unit, or GPU, renders graphics by simultaneously hashing out the same problem for multiple pixels: textures, lighting and smooth rendering of shapes flying across the screen.

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These include a CPU (central processing unit), GPU (graphics processing unit), memory and other elements.

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