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Nvidia CUDA Toolkit Now Available

In the latest podcast, due to be online by tomorrow, we mentioned the imminent release of Nvidia’s CUDA.  CUDA is a C programming environment that allows programmers to use their graphics card’s processors to do computational tasks not neccessarily related to graphics rendering.  The toolkit is not only compatible with the new GTX series cards, but many of the 8xxx and 9xxx consumer cards from the company.  Click here for a full list of CUDA compatible cards.  It’s bigger than you think.

Well, the CUDA Toolkit is now available for for most operatings systems, including the 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows Vista and XP, as well as Linux and Mac OS X.

NVIDIA CUDA-enabled products can help accelerate the most demanding tasks—from video and audio encoding to oil and gas exploration, product design, medical imaging, and scientific research. Many CUDA programs require at least 256 MB of memory attached to the GPU.

With ATI developing their own general processing solutions, and Nvidia already demonstrating a mobile device using a graphics chip for all operations, it seems the GPU could very well become the CPU of the future.

If you want to try your hand at coding, all the downloads are available here.

UPDATE:  It should be noted that for some strange reason, Intel considers GPGPUs (General Purpose Graphics Processing Units) such as CUDA are nothing more than a foot note.  Of course, that remains to be seen.

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