What Is an Accelerated Processing Unit?

Accelerated processing unit refers to the processing unit integrated in the central processing unit of a computer system that can assist the traditional central processing unit to process special types of computing tasks. It is generally a combination design of "general-purpose processor core" + "stream processing unit".

The concept of "accelerated processing unit" was first introduced in 2006 in response to the problem of speeding up operations and was used by the public. It can also be seen in various technical lectures and in the Scalable Informatics [5] business plan written by Joe Landman. However, there are also uses of "accelerated processing unit" specifically referring to auxiliary processing units, such as Xilinx.

When the accelerated processing unit (APU) became widely known, it was the AMD APU series of processors introduced by AMD in 2011. Due to the influence of AMD s market promotion for AMD Fusion (currently AMD APU), many people generally think that APU is a built-in display core in traditional CPU cores (that is, the microprocessor and the display core are integrated on a chip) AMD APU products, however, this design can indeed improve the data transmission performance between the CPU and GPU (built-in) and reduce the power consumption and heat generation of the processor chip during operation, using current technology, and compared with traditional CPU to located

The computer industry continues to introduce new logic elements to ease the work of the main processor and solve special tasks. These include processing MP3 data, processing video data, generating audio signals, and digital signal processors. The mathematical auxiliary processors used in the 1980s and 1990s can also be counted in it. These mathematical auxiliary processors assist the central processing unit in calculating floating point numbers. They can be plugged into dedicated sockets on the motherboard. Today they are integrated on the same chip as the main processor.