Technology progres is not staying on the same level, but going forward with rocket speed.
For a few years everybody is talking about RISC technologies and how they are being incorporated in the modern processors. CPU is not the only place where it works well. GPU cards (video cards for your PC) are taking advantage of it for some time already and now a next step has been made – public API to reuse computing power of GPUs.
This a very new thing (9 months is not a long time), but it already start to stir software comunity.
Is factor of 25 in performance increase sound good? But lets come back to this later.
It is not yet widely known, but in February 2007, NVidia released a software development kit known as CUDA.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html
It is available for download and allows take advantage of GPU processors.
Windows XP is one of the platforms where libraries are supported.
NVidia started to offer GPU solutions which are working with it, from very inexpensive for a few hundreds of dollars to very powerful and dedicated which probably will cost you thousands.
http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce8.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html
Tesla is promised to be
“high performance computing (HPC) solutions arm scientists, engineers and other technical professionals with the power to solve previously unsolvable problems. A dedicated, high performance GPU computing solution, Tesla brings supercomputing power to any workstation or server and to standard, CPU-based server clusters.”
It is a very new field and there is not many applications which can show you this beauty. But… there is one example which might be an upcoming storm in computer security comunity.
Elcomsoft (Russia) began to offer a password recovery solution http://www.crackpassword.com/products/prs/integpack/edpr/?r1=rus_eng&r2=edpr based on CUDA core and claims that they were able get increase in performance by factor up to 25. More details here http://www.crackpassword.com/about/news_detail.php?ID=2983
Very impressive. Do you have GeForce 8800? Might be you can tell me if it is really true.
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