GPUs

Stream processing and general purpose GPUs (GPGPU)

It is common to use a general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) as a modified form of stream processor or a vector processor, running compute kernels. This turns the massive computational power of a modern graphics accelerator's shader pipeline into general-purpose computing power. In certain applications requiring massive vector operations, this can yield several orders of magnitude higher performance than a conventional CPU. The two largest discrete GPU designers, AMD and Nvidia, are pursuing this approach with an array of applications. Nvidia and AMD collaborated with Stanford University to create a GPU-based client for the Folding@home distributed computing project for protein folding calculations. In certain circumstances, the GPU calculates forty times faster than the CPUs traditionally used by such applications.