Hello, the reason I asked about IM on GPUs is that GPUs can process graphic object much faster (10-30 times) and that the acceleration rate of GPU development is faster than the known Moore cycles (doubling in 6 month instead 18). This is because many graphic algorithms can be parallelized and the GPUs are (massive) parallel architectures whereas many transistors in CPUs are occupied in pre- and post processing operations for sequential processing.
But not only graphical applications benefit from GPUs because they are become programmable and a scientific community is working on general purpose GPU programming see the overview on http://graphics.idav.ucdavis.edu/publications/print_pub?pub_id=907 or the website http://www.gpgpu.org GPU programming is slowly moving from an academic playground to the mainstream since big players realize the opportunities: -AMD/ATI, NVidia and third parties are offering boards and development tools - Apple uses in OSX 10.4 Core Image that can use a GPU for near real-time image and video processing http://developer.apple.com/macosx/coreimage.html it uses with the CIKernel language a subset of OpenGL that is relevant for 2D graphic -Google buying Peakstream Nevertheless general purpose GPU programming is different (Stream Processing) and there are no standards at the moment only OpenGL for the graphic side. But there are approaches to make GPU programming easier and Google supports a lot of Open Source projects so perhaps they will releasing some Peakstream technology for the public after they achieved their in-house goals. It would be big step for IM if it could use a GPU especially for batch processing where nothing is displayed and the GPU is doing practically nothing. regards Günter _______________________________________________ Magick-users mailing list [email protected] http://studio.imagemagick.org/mailman/listinfo/magick-users
