Nintendo's Origins
Acquired
How Nintendo Created the First Programmable GPU - 10 Years Before Nvidia
Nintendo's R&D2 team created a home video game console that was years ahead of the competition and sold for a cheaper price. They achieved this by using cheap, off-the-shelf technology for the CPU and pairing it with a secondary processing unit called the PPU. The PPU was a dedicated chip that processed the graphics output on the television and had specialized circuitry for backgrounds and sprites. This architecture, where the workload was split, was a groundbreaking innovation in the gaming market, as it was a decade before Nvidia invented the GPU. Previous consoles had chips for graphics output, but they were not programmable and did not have onboard memory. This achievement by Nintendo was driven by the constraint of creating a console under $100, showcasing their cleverness.
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