Imagine that the appendix in primates had evolved. Instead of becoming a prehensile organ routinely removed from humans when it became troublesome, imagine the appendix had grown a dense cluster of complex neurons to become the seat of rational thought, leaving the brain to handle housekeeping and control functions. That scenario would not be far from what has happened to graphics processing units (GPUs).

Once upon a time, graphics computations were just another set of numerically intensive tasks running on a PC or workstation host CPU. Responding to the market value of prettier, more animated images, these computers began to use attached vector-arithmetic hardware to generate, rotate and scale the vectors that, in the early days, constituted the bulk of graphics images.

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