Creating the First Confidential GPUs
Gobikrishna Dhanuskodi, Sudeshna Guha, Vidhya Krishnan, Aruna Manjunatha, Michael B. O’Connor, Rob Nertney, Phil Rogers
Abstract
Today's datacenter GPU has a long and storied 3D graphics heritage. In the 1990s, graphics chips for PCs and consoles had fixed pipelines for geometry, rasterization, and pixels using integer and fixed-point arithmetic. In 1999, NVIDIA invented the modern GPU, which put a set of programmable cores at the heart of the chip, enabling rich 3D scene generation with great efficiency. It did not take long for developers and researchers to realize 'I could run compute on those parallel cores, and it would be blazing fast.' In 2004, Ian Buck created Brook at Stanford, the first compute library for GPUs, and in 2006, NVIDIA created CUDA, which is the gold standard for accelerated computing on GPUs today.