graphics processing

It will come as no surprise that Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jen-Hsun Huang believes in the future of graphics processing. As he pointed out in a two-and-a-half hour presentation at the Nvision 2008 conference, today's GPUs have the equivalent of 1,000 times the processing power of a Cray supercomputer from 30 years ago.

What's less obvious is that Huang also sees Nvidia's future in smartphones.

Advanced Micro Devices announced Tuesday what it called "the world's fastest graphics chip." Its ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 delivers 2.4 teraFLOPS of graphics processing on a single card. Available Sept. 1., the HD 4870 is reported to consume less power at greater performance than competing single- or even some dual-card solutions, such as NVIDIA's 9800 series.

Size, Performance and Cost