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“With the introduction of Windows 7, the GPU and CPU will exist in a co-processing environment where each can handle the computing task they are best suited for,” wrote Chris Daniel, product manager for software at Nvidia. “The CPU is exceptionally good at performing sequential calculations, I/O, and program flow, whereas the GPU is perfectly suited for performing massive parallel calculations.”

“With new software designed to take advantage of this capability you would be able to copy and transcode (convert a video from one format to another – a very computationally intensive task) a movie to your MTP supported portable media device up to 5 times faster when using the GPU as a co-processor with DX Compute, as compared to only doing the processing on the CPU.”

“Parallel programming is the next big thing for the world of computing – it has started already. DirectX Compute will accelerate this discontinuity by enabling massive parallelism to the masses. What we are talking about is co-processing— essentially using the right tool for the job.”

-Chris Daniel, product manager for software at Nvidia posted on the Microsoft partner blog

Yet one another reason to get stoked about Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released, Windows 7 operating system. We’ve been hearing Nvidia speak publicly about blurring the lines between the GPU and CPU for a while now, notably around the time they released their hybrid-sli. With applications being specifically developed for DirectX Compute, maybe we will get to see our systems utilize more of it’s available resources.

For example, you have a killer gaming PC with the latest and greatest graphics card. Most newer PC games rely heavily on the GPU versus the CPU unless it’s based on the Source engine. But outside of the games, how much of your systems resources and “horsepower” is actually being utilized? When you’re encoding a video file, is your system offloading portions of the workload to that latest and greatest GPU in order to complete the process in a shorter amount of time?

Probably not…

yet.