OpenGL Programming on Mac OS X: Architecture, Performance, and Integration

Chapter 3. Mac Hardware Architecture

Overview

We’ll now step back from the software side of things and look at hardware. Most modern personal computers have at least two large processors in them; a central processing unit (CPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU—a term coined in the late 1990s). In 2001, the number of transistors in GPUs caught up with and surpassed the number within CPUs. Although this feat is in large part a result of parallel logic in the GPUs, it still speaks loudly to the fact that more and more processing in today’s computers is happening on the GPU. These are exciting times to be a graphics developer!

Now that there are more transistors on the GPU than on the CPU, graphics developers have been looking at many different ...