A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles.
GPUs are specifically designed to handle the large number of computationally intensive tasks involved in rendering images and video, making them highly efficient for these types of operations. This is in contrast to a Central Processing Unit (CPU), which is a general-purpose processor that is capable of handling a wide range of tasks but is not as efficient at handling graphical data.
Modern GPUs have become increasingly powerful, with some high-end models containing hundreds of processing cores and capable of performing billions of operations per second. This has led to their increasing use for general-purpose computing tasks, including machine learning and scientific simulations, in addition to their traditional use for graphics processing.