Introduction

The chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi (a Broadcom BCM2835 processor) was originally designed to be a Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) for mobile and embedded applications. The ARM core that drives most of the Raspberry Pi's functionality was added because some extra space was available on the chip; this enabled this powerful GPU to be used as a System-On-Chip (SoC) solution.

As you can imagine, if the ARM core (ARM1176JZF-S, which is the ARMv6 architecture) consists of only a small part of the chip on the Raspberry Pi, you would be right in thinking that the GPU must perform rather well. The VideoCore IV GPU consists of 48 purpose-built processors, with some providing support for 1080p high-definition encoding and decoding of video while others supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 that provide fast calculations for 3D graphics. It has been said that its graphics processing power is equivalent to that of an Apple iPhone 4s and also the original Microsoft Xbox. This is even more apparent...