S3 told us that they too have General Purpose GPU (GPGPU) capabilities (link). The companyis showing its S3FotoPro image processing application as a proof (of existance). I have not seen any computing benchmark, so it’s hard to tell what kind of performance improvements (over the CPU) S3 is getting, but from what I can tell, S3 doesn’t seem to run OpenCL andthis would be needed to perform application comparisons across multiple vendors. Also, there’s an important difference between GPGPU and High-Performance Computing (HPC) that you might want to look at:
- GPGPU uses the graphics pipeline (via DX10, OpenGL) to perform compute operations
- HPC applications are written in a high-level language (C or C++) and executed using the GPU compute-only hardware (no texture filter, no raster ops…)
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