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GPUs (i.e. Nvidia and AMD/ATI) are the linear descendants of these supercomputers. Today's standard GPU's have vector processing units with fixed pipelines optimized for graphics operations.

Glen Miranker and Jon Rubenstein of Ardent made their way to Apple where they spec'd/designed the Velocity Engine that went into the PowerPC G4/5. It had a 128-bit vector execution unit that required the use of the AltiVec API.



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