NVIDIA G80 Architecture Launch (GeForce 8800 GTX)

NVIDIA launched its G80 GPU architecture, powering the GeForce 8800 series. This was the first GPU designed from the ground up to support a unified shader model, making it ideal for general-purpose computation beyond traditional graphics.

Significance

The G80 was the hardware cornerstone upon which CUDA was built. Its unified architecture made the programming model feasible and efficient, paving the way for GPGPU.