GPU-accelerated computing is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU) together with a CPU to accelerate scientific, analytics, engineering, consumer, and enterprise applications. Pioneered in 2007 by NVIDIA, GPU accelerators now power energy-efficient datacenters in government labs, universities, enterprises, and small-and-medium businesses around the world. GPUs are accelerating applications in platforms ranging from cars, to mobile phones and tablets, to drones and robots.
GPU-accelerated computing offers unprecedented application performance by offloading compute-intensive portions of the application to the GPU, while the remainder of the code still runs on the CPU. From a user's perspective, applications simply run significantly faster.
A simple way to understand the difference between a CPU and GPU is to compare how they process tasks. A CPU consists of a few cores optimized for sequential serial processing while a GPU has a massively parallel architecture consisting of thousands of smaller, more efficient cores designed for handling multiple tasks simultaneously.
GPUs have thousands of cores to process parallel workloads efficiently.