Background and History
The TMU came about due to the compute demands of sampling and transforming a flat image (as the texture map) to the correct angle and perspective it would need to be in 3D space. The compute operation is a large matrix multiply, which CPUs of the time (early Pentiums) could not cope with at acceptable performance.
Today, TMUs are part of the shader pipeline and decoupled from the Render Output Pipelines (ROPs). For example, in AMD's Cypress GPU, each shader pipeline (of which there are 20) has four TMUs, giving the GPU 80 TMUs. This is done by chip designers to closely couple shaders and the texture engines they will be working with.
Read more about this topic: Texture Mapping Unit
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