Fast Forward: Parallelism
After decades of fitful progress, parallel processing is suddenly hot and will soon be commonplace on ordinary PCs. For applications rich in data-level parallelism, performance is soaring by leaps and bounds. Multicore CPUs from Intel and AMD are all good, but the game-changers are the next-gen GPUs from Nvidia and AMD/ATI. These chips are evolving from highly specialized 3D-graphics processors for games into broader computing engines for nongame software. Nvidia is leading the charge with a new GPU architecture that, for the first time, supports general-purpose computing as strongly as it supports graphics
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