Nvidia activates a supercomputer in your PC

[jeffy]

Nvidia today released the first public beta of its CUDA, software developer kit, which so far has only been available to a limited number of developers.

The company promises that the software will allow full access to the 128/96 cores of GeForce 8800 graphics cards and leverage their floating point capability, not only for graphics, but other applications that rely on number crunching performance as well.

http://tgdaily.com/2007/02/16/nvidia_cuda/

[Sinizterguy]

Would be great if video encoding can be done on all CPU cores + the 8800 core either singly or in SLI.

[Inventive Software]

Yeah, except that's just a little bit flawed. The 8800 has 128 stream processors (in this case, FPU's) that can perform one MAD and one MUL calculation per clock (definitions on these welcome, as Wikipedia doesn't help! :D). On the GTX, that's 1.35 GHz. It'd need a lot of understanding and programming know-how though. However, it is definitely something I think H.264 and VC-1 HD encoding could benefit from.

[jeffy]

Yeah, except that's just a little bit flawed. The 8800 has 128 stream processors (in this case, FPU's) that can perform one MAD and one MUL calculation per clock (definitions on these welcome, as Wikipedia doesn't help! :D). On the GTX, that's 1.35 GHz. It'd need a lot of understanding and programming know-how though. However, it is definitely something I think H.264 and VC-1 HD encoding could benefit from.

MUL = multiply
MAD = multiply and add
Link:
http://anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2870