Digital Home Thoughts: ATI Stream Finally Launched To Combat Cuda

"The idea with GPU computing is to take highly parallelized tasks typically run in the CPU and offload them to the GPU, where they can run more quickly and efficiently. Programmable shaders are exceptionally well-suited for floating point-intensive tasks. Each shader operates as its own sort of processor core, so instead of having four or eight threads crunching on a parallelized task in the CPU, you could have 64 or 320 or however many stream processors tackling the same work in the GPU."

It took nearly two years for AMD to come out with a response to NVidia's CUDA platform and even at that, when ATI Stream was first released it was severely limited. AMD has finally released an update that puts ATI Stream much more in line with the competition. Toms Hardware takes the update for a spin and finds that there are still a few parts that need polishing. It's great to see GPUs getting more use since their parallel processing capabilities are astounding, CUDA still seems to have a considerable edge for varying applications which along with video and image processing can also do things such as PhysX.