General-purpose computing on graphics processing units

General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, rarely GPGP or GP²U) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the central processing unit (CPU). The use of multiple graphics cards in one computer, or large numbers of graphics chips, further parallelizes the already parallel nature of graphics processing. In addition, even a single GPU-CPU framework provides advantages that multiple CPUs on their own do not offer due to the specialization in each chip.

Essentially, a GPGPU pipeline is a kind of parallel processing between one or more GPUs and CPUs that analyzes data as if it were in image or other graphic form. While GPUs generally operate at lower frequencies, they usually have many times more cores to make up for it (up to hundreds at least) and can, thus, operate on pictures and graphical data effectively much faster, dozens or even hundreds of times faster than a traditional CPU, migrating data into graphical form and then using the GPU to "look" at it and analyze it can result in profound speedup.