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Audio Processing on Your Graphics Card?
edsarkiss writes "BionicFX has announced Audio Video EXchange (AVEX), a technology that transforms real-time audio into video and performs audio effect processing on the GPU of your NVIDIA 3D video card, the latest of which are apparently capable of more than 40 gigaflops of processing power compared to less than 6 gigaflops on Intel and AMD CPUs." Another reader points out a story on Tom's Hardware.
Some functions of a word processor (grammar checking, for one) would be well suited to a GPU...the algorithm is relatively small, the processing per byte of data relatively high, and the result need not be immediate.
That's what GPUs are designed for -- performing massively iterative algorithms on sets of data and returning the processed dataset. There are lots of algorithms that might benefit from this: encoding better digital video, searching for patterns, crunching numbers for encryption, etc. There are also lots of algorithms that would be NO GOOD -- SQL select statements, for example, or rendering web pages. Basically, any time processing is low and I/O is high, the GPU is a bad idea.
Think of the GPU as a tiny little distributed computing network on your own computer. And thank the video game industry for finally making signal co-processors commercially viable.
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