The AIB shown in the above image has four 8 MB SGRAM chips. The GPU had a large 128-bit memory interface, and it could use DDR or SGRAM memory, a choice made by OEM board partners and usually done as a price-performance trade-off. The first AIB to use the 64 MB SDR was ELSA’s ERAZOR X which used its own design to create a NLX form factor board.
However, Nvidia offered reference designs to its OEM partners. The GeForce 256 AIB employed the NV10 with SDR memory.īefore Nvidia started offering Nvidia-branded AIBs, the company depended on partners to build and sell the boards. But Nvidia came out ahead in the terminology wars and has since been associated with the GPU and credited with inventing it.īased on TSMC’s 220-nm process, the 120 MHz NV10 had 17 million transistors in a 139 mm² die and used DirectX 7.0. ATI quickly followed with their Radeon graphics chip and called it a visual processing unit-VPU. Then, in October 1999, Nvidia introduced the NV10 GPU with an integrated T&L engine for a new consumer graphics card. 3Dlabs’ GMX was a co-processor to the Glint rasterizer. The GPU was a separate chip named Delta (also known as the DMX). In 1997, 3Dlabs developed its Glint Gamma processor, the first programmable transform and lighting engine as part of its Glint workstation graphics chips, and it introduced the term GPU-geometry processor unit.
A T&L engine is a vertex shader and a geometry translator. The operation was known at the time as transform and lighting (T&L). Architects from various graphics chip companies decided transform-and-lighting (T&L) was a function that should be in the graphics processor. One of the biggest strains on the CPU was graphics transformation compute elements into graphics processors. As the number of transistors engineers could cram on a single chip increased almost exponentially, the number of functions in the CPU and the graphics processor increased. Very-large-scale integrated circuits, or VLSI, started taking hold of the semiconductor industry in the early 1990s.
It offered integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines in a single-chip processor. Nvidia popularized it in 1999 by marketing the GeForce 256 add-in board (AIB) as the world’s first fully integrated graphics processing unit. The term "GPU" has been in use since at least the 1980s. This article is part of the Electronics History series: The Graphics Chip Chronicles.
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