S3 jumps onto the General Purpose GPU wagon

S3 told us that they too have General Purpose GPU (GPGPU) capabilities (link). The company is 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 and this 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…)

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Computers, Top Stories