Lets hope OpenCL will be "brand" agnostic. I got here 1600 Cores that love to game...and folding.

Lets hope sometime cooler comes along.

Still waiting for the apps that "most of us use" (key words here) to have this facility.

The most impressive feature of 7 I've seen yet. I hope developers take advantage of this as much as possible.

I built my rig when core2 quad's got to a reasonable price and set up sli as well to future proof, thinking everything was moving to multithread. Now if general purpose software gets offloaded unto the gpu's, it would be a boost to the useful lifespan of my computer.
If at the very least it would be good to know that when I'm not gaming the graphics cards are doing more then Just heading up my home

... where is the news?

whats the difference between this and Nvida CUDA technology?

I'm hoping for DirectX compute support in Handbrake, but I'm sure we're more likely to get OpenCL support first due to it being cross platform. Either option should do well assuming nvidia and ati have support in their drivers for both options. Other applications that will probably adopt gpu computing would be photoshop(more general than the current 3d acceleration) and a boatload of professional level video and CAD applications. For average users, this all means nothing (average people don't do anything computing intensive, but here's hoping for accelerated adobe flash).

Transcoding and encoding is all i need now i can put to use my powerhouse gpu more and spend less on powerhouse cpu's. Doing Ultra low High quality encoding takes a long time even on a good set up.

sounds kind of like CUDA, but yes Nukemaster, for all GPU's. and if thats the case, maybe programmers will get around to utilizing GPU's for 3D Animation, which is something ive been waiting for for a long time now. fingers crossed

g-thor, You can also transcode all that PVR stuff you recorded

twisted politiks, About time huh. If i recall, ATI cards did all the transformers trailers in real time...

hopefully it will be an open standard and that windows takes advantage with out having developers rewrite the wheel.
Both ATI and NVidia have some kind of acceleration already. I think problem is, that it needs to be transparent for the end user.

This is Nvidia's race against larrabee. Cuda and Stream for that matter are still not implemented well enough to supplant CPU based encoders. Even if it's implemented into DX you would still need applications to apporpriately code for the the acceleration. Look how long it took to get DXVA acceleration to work for h.264, and it still not 100%.

Since Larrabee is going to be x86, leveraging it for multithreaded encoding will be much easier. Intel doesn't like the idea of Nvidia and ATI/AMD GPUs doing CPU like work. I have a feeling larabee will crush the other GPUs at parallel computing.

And I'm still waiting for a proper, working, 100% FREE gpu based video transcoder.

* ATi's free video encoder's quality is just really not up-to-par.

Does this mean that if your going SLI or Crossfire then that extra GPU will also be able to take more load off the CPU? Cause that would make sli and crossfire even MORE useful then it already is.

Oh great so i can transcode my movies a bit faster for my iPod. What else? I'm still waiting for a real useful software that can use my GPU.

the vendor would be ATI, the product is Radeon.

Will it mean that in the future netbooks will come with eg: a single core CPU processor, and a (crappy) integrated graphics card,and that in windows we'll see over 16 cores (threads)?
I'd love to see if the OS can boot and do background tasks faster thanks to the smaller threads that the GPU can process.

I'd also love to see if programs like MS office, Adobe, etc.., could see a benefit in booting speed thanks to this technology, and that it won't be limited to video encoding, or x@home clients.