Nvidia to expand CUDA parallel processing to mobile devices

From InfoWorld: Nvidia is looking to expand its CUDA parallel-processing architecture to mobile devices in the next few years, the company's CEO said Wednesday.

The move, when it comes, could mean a big jump in the ability of mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers to run multimedia-rich applications.

"The benefit of CUDA in mobile devices is shocking," said Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, in a Tokyo interview.

CUDA allows for certain processor-intensive tasks such as video editing or image manipulation to be off-loaded from the main processor to a graphics processor, realizing a significant improvement in data processing speed.

Graphics chips are restricted in the type of processing they can carry out but, with over 100 cores in a modern graphics processor versus just a handful of cores in a CPU, they are particularly good at the kind of image and video tasks that tax a typical CPU. The CUDA architecture combines software and hardware to realize these improvements.

CUDA was quickly adopted for supercomputers, and some of the fastest machines in the world are based on combinations of Nvidia GPUs and Intel CPUs. More recently it's arrived on the enterprise and consumer desktop and helped speed up tasks like video encoding in Adobe Premiere CS5.

View: Article @ Source Site