Nvidia GPU As An Audio Processor

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20040902_135943.html' target='_blank'>http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20040902_135943.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Nvidia's graphic cards may have much more to offer than simply drawing pixels on the screen: A startup company has found a way to translate audio signals into graphics, run them through the graphics card and overcome a common issue of limited audio effect processing performance in computers. It is not unusual that professional music artists run into performance barriers even with the most powerful computers today. Multi-track recording still is a challenging and sometimes frustrating task. James Cann from BionicFX in Massachusetts however noticed that audio processing task does not have to happen just in the CPU."</i><br /><br />This technology allows music hobbyists and professional artists to run studio quality audio effects at high sample rates on their desktop computer. And of course, this may just be the starting point of what the GPU can do. Imaging how this might help compute servers where the CPU is really performing computationally hard tasks and the OS level stuff can be re-routed through the GPU. Very cool.

[Jason Dunn]

This is very cool - the GPU is under-utilized in most computers, so being able to tap into it would be awesome! :D

[Suhit Gupta]

This is very cool - the GPU is under-utilized in most computers, so being able to tap into it would be awesome! :DYeah. In fact, I wonder if it is possible to extend this to other chips on the computer as well. The network card typically has a pretty good network processor, and the sound card has a nice chip on it as well. I wonder if it is possible to make a mini-network of small chips to offload work when the main CPU does not have spare cycles. So something like a Beowulf cluster, but at the micro level, i.e. withing one unit.

Suhit