Intel’s Larrabee architecture for visual computing is slated for 2009 release; The Radeon HD 4800 series graphic card, the world’s first fuelled by a teraflop processor, was launched in India recently, by AMD (Anand Parthasarathy); The GeForce graphical unit powered by nVidia’s GTX280 chips.

In the pecking order of personal computer chips, co-processors were children of a lesser breed. Remember the heydays, two decades ago, of the Intel 80386 central processing unit? Customers who wanted to quicken the number-crunching capabilities of their PCs invested in an additional maths co-processor, the 80387, to accelerate what were known as floating point operations, by performing them directly on the hardware. As the main processor became more powerful, such add-ons became unnecessary.

Then came a new era in computing, fuelled by the gaming fever of the world’s young and restless customers, who looked to the PC not for productivity but picture power: fast action and mind-blowing graphics. No general-purpose processor was able to deliver the realistic gaming that such users demanded…. and so was born the new niche of graphics cards, fuelled by a new class of Graphical processing units of GPUs, optimised for the superior speeds demanded by PC and video games.

nVidia, Asus, Creative…. new brands emerged that created a separate hardware category, running on chips that, in many cases, outperformed general-purpose processors, mega flop for megaflop. Indeed, the Cell processor created by IBM for this burgeoning market was so good at what it did that scientists were quietly slipping it into mission-critical and military systems.

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