[88j88]

Some years before CUDA there was a lot of hype when the first GPGPU papers published in 2003 which showed significantly increasing performance using parallel computation from consumer graphics cards. At the time, it looked like competing on general purpose computation was a solid strategy: multi-core CPU from intel was still years away, showing up in 2005; starting from 2000 the rate of increase of clock speeds started slumping. We saw Intel started releasing more variants of processors, but the clock speeds weren't advancing exponentially anymore. The new battle for core supremacy was on the horizon.

[pjmlp]

I have papers collecting digital dust already doing compute with GPGPU assembly language.

We already knew some of the possibilities when looking at Renderman, or early GPGPU attempts like the TMS34010.