Digital Home Thoughts: AMD Comes Full Circle. CPUs are GPUs are CPUs.

"AMD has announced the release of the first OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs, and it will enable developers to target x86 processors with the kind of OpenCL code that's normally written for GPUs. In a way, this is a reverse of the normal "GPGPU" trend, in which programs that run on a CPU are modified to run in whole or in part on a GPU."

Parallel processing is a hot trend in computing. Taking advantage of the horsepower available in video cards has become more and more desirable, especially to accelerate media processing. Both NVidia and AMD have been working hard to provide a development platform that allows you to use their video cards for more than just pretty 3D graphics, but AMD has just taken it a step further, extending their platform to support x86 processors. The biggest benefit I see is it makes OpenCL much more universal, giving developers more incentive to use it. Those of us with the extra horsepower can then see a great boost in more programs, but those of us without will not be left behind.