What are accelerators and why do they matter?
There’s something remarkable about human behavior. We care a lot about our own experiences. Many of the arts and sciences, particularly social science, specialize in quantifying, predicting, and understanding the implications and particularities of human behavior. One of the most obvious of these is human responses to technical performance. While this certainly varies among human groups, for the subset that chooses to spend a sizeable portion of their time interacting with technology, one theorem is self-evident. Faster and easier is always better.
Take video games, for example. While the 1940s and 50s saw some of the earliest video games, these didn’t come to massive popularity until arcade games such as Pong emerged in the early 70s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was nearly exactly the same time as the introduction of the original Graphics Processor Unit (GPU), in 1973 (1)! 1994 gave us the PlayStation1 with its Sony GPU...
