General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU, also referred to as GPGP and to a lesser extent GP²) is a recent trend in computer science that uses the Graphics Processing Unit to perform the computations rather than the CPU. The addition of programmable stages and higher precision arithmetic to the GPU rendering pipeline have allowed software developers to use the GPU for non graphics related applications. Because of the extremely parallel nature of the graphics pipeline the GPU is especially useful for programs that can be cast as stream processing problems.