Hide the sketches?

Interesting article that I’ve been following for some time. Over the past few years nvidia and ati, through Moores Law and augmented from the pressures of the supply and demand curve enabled today’s graphics accelerators to surpass CPU performance. Todays GPUs take more and more of the processing load off the CPU and onto the graphic processing unit, plus with the fairly recent merger of ATI and AMD one can only expect to see wonderful things over the horizon.

The main bottlenecks not only lie in the way a CPU is manufactured but lies in the information highway (the motherboard) it uses to communicate with the separate components. As of now, when the CPU makes a request it travels from your hard drive, through the sata controller, to the northbridge chip, into the ram, through the on-board cache, and then into the processor. The bandwidth allowed by the northbridge chip is always a few years behind the console counter-parts. Thats why when a new gaming console comes out, the graphics beat the pants off of a sub-$3000 PC.

Well since the GPUs have become mroe powerful, high power games and applications such as adobe premiere cs3 and after effects cs3 take some of the chores off the dusty pentium and onto the gpu (or videocard.) This is highly exciting and not only because we want a faster machine but because of the theory that basing calculations off processing graphics ended up being not only a simpler solution, but a faster one for floating-point operations.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-cuda-gpu,1954.html