Yeah, never thought I'd say this but I think I agree with the marketing guys here. I guess there's a first time for everything.
"Graphics Processing Unit" was purely a marketing term at the time. I mean, there's no lies there. It was a unit, and it processed graphics. It doesn't claim any specific sort of processing capability. If Nintendo had invented that term in 1985 I wouldn't have seen anything wrong with them calling the NES' video chip a "GPU."
Of course today "GPU" has a pretty specific meaning. It basically inherited the meaning from the clunky outdated term "GPGPU."
"Graphics Processing Unit" was purely a marketing term at the time. I mean, there's no lies there. It was a unit, and it processed graphics. It doesn't claim any specific sort of processing capability. If Nintendo had invented that term in 1985 I wouldn't have seen anything wrong with them calling the NES' video chip a "GPU."
Of course today "GPU" has a pretty specific meaning. It basically inherited the meaning from the clunky outdated term "GPGPU."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...