Luckily, since the internet was booming, so was computing power. Hardware kept becoming cheaper as well as faster, seemingly following Moore's famous law (which states that processor speeds should double every two years—this has been true for almost four decades, though a deceleration is now being observed). As computers got faster, they also became better designed for computer vision. And for this, we have to thank video games.
The graphical processing unit (GPU) is a computer component, that is, a chip specifically designed to handle the kind of operations needed to run 3D games. Therefore, a GPU is optimized to generate or manipulate images, parallelizing these heavy matrix operations. Though the first GPUs were conceived in the 80s, they became affordable and popular only with the advent of the new millennium.
In 2007, NVIDIA, one of the main companies designing GPUs, released the first version of CUDA, a programming language that allows developers...