It's GPGPU time...
NVIDIA has been taking abuse from all angles recently - AMD recently stripped it of the single-card performance crown, and Intel continues to prepare an all-out annihilation with Larrabee.
Despite the looming threats, NVIDIA has remained incessant about one particular GPU-saving technology; general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU).
GPGPU, in its simplest form, entails using a computer's GPU to carry out computations normally performed by the CPU. With the sheer amount of power available in modern GPUs - we're talking in excess of one trillion floating-point operations per second - the ever-growing number of stream processors provides an opportunity for massive parallel computation. It's a familiar story, and we've been hearing it from both AMD and NVIDIA for some time, but we're finally beginning to see the results.
Software developers are now seriously beginning to take advantage of the parallel processing capability once thought to be solely useful for computer graphics, and one of the first mainstream and widespread examples arrived yesterday in the form of Adobe's Creative Suite 4.
NVIDIA hails the milestone release as "the first application set of its kind to take advantage of the power of native GPU acceleration", and it could bring a whole new meaning to the term "graphics card".
NVIDIA's Ujesh Desai, now the company's vice president of product marketing, states that the NVIDIA and Adobe collaboration has been in development for three-to-four years, and Creative Suite 4 is the result of its labour.
So, what does the GPU-accelerated Creative Suite 4 have in store? Let's take a closer look.
