From the first GPUs to the most powerful GPUs seen today, GPUs continue to make a noticeable mark upon society with limitless applications, as we are going to see in the The social impact of GPUs section of this chapter. For now, let's look into how GPU specifications evolved since they became available at much reduced costs, since the rise of the gaming industry.
GPU computing has massively grown in the last two decades with the creation of GPU application programmable interfaces (APIs) such as Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) and OpenCL. These APIs allow the programmer to harness the parallel computational elements within the GPU.
Let's compare these two APIs:
| CUDA | OpenCL |
| CUDA has been specifically written for NVIDIA GPU architecture. | OpenCL is not architecture-specific and is more commonly known as a computing... |
