alt Hacker News> what does it mean for a GPU to drive a boot sequence
It's a quirk of the broadcom chips that the rpi family uses; the GPU is the first bit of silicon to power up and do things. The GPU specifically is a bit unusual, but the general idea of "smaller thing does initial bring up, then powers up $main_cpu" is not unusual once $main_cpu is ~ powerful enough to run linux.
That’s interesting, particularly since as far as I can tell, nothing in userland really bothers to make use of its GPU. I would really like to understand why, since I have a whole bunch of Pi’s and it seems like their GPUs can’t be used for much of anything (not really much for transcoding nor for AI).