From what I remember, the term GPU was invented by NVIDIA's marketing team for the GeForce campaign. It sounded a bit weird in the beginning. In hindsight, it was a strike of genius.
If I recall correctly, "GPU" was attached to the GeForce 3, which introduced programmable pixel and vertex shaders (planting the seeds for later, general-purpose processing developments like CUDA and eventually cryptocurrency mining).
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The term GPU was popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256 as "the world's first GPU", or Graphics Processing Unit,[2] although the term had been in use since at least the 1980s.[3] It was presented as a "single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines".[4] Rival ATI Technologies coined the term "visual processing unit" or VPU with the release of the Radeon 9700 in 2002.[5]
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I had forgotten that ATI initially tried to push the term VPU instead of accepting NVIDIA's terminology. The goal of both companies's marketing teams was the same--to convince the market that GPUs were as indispensable as CPUs and not just optional accelerators.