Architectural evolution of NVIDIA GPUs for High-Performance Computing

In this report we consider the rapid technological development of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in the last decade, which enables, besides the traditional use of GPUs as graphics cards, the so-called GPU computing, i.e. the use of GPUs for non-graphical computationally intensive general-purpose applications. We also provide a brief history of graphics cards and related programming languages. We consider the NVIDIA GPUs, owing their widespread diffusion, high-performance and very rapid evolution. NVIDIA was the first company in the GPU computing market and is currently the leading.