Pixels to Teraflops: 30 Years of GPUs

This is a talk on the history of programmable graphics hardware. Highlights will include the earliest graphics systems, the earliest programmable graphics systems (including PixelFlow) some of the first attempts at programmable pipelines on consumer GPUs using register combiners and multiple passes, leading all the way up to early GPGPU programs. We will see how this lead up to a shift in the goal for GPU manufacturers and how demand for these new types of computation caused the direction of an entire market to change. The architecture of many of the highlighted systems will be discussed and will have accompanying diagrams.