In 2008, GPU computing was supposed to be the next big thing. Before that time, we had always been held back by the limitations of our CPUs, while the vast power of our graphics hardware sat idle. Now the era of the general-purpose GPU had arrived, and hardware that had previously been dedicated solely to animating Lara Croft and her adversaries could now be used to speed up desktop applications and OS processes across the board.
That was the idea anyway and there was some solid sense behind it. While a typical CPU of the time might have had two or four cores, popular graphics cards such as the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX were shipping with 192 silicon cores all running in parallel. This represented an awful lot of untapped horsepower.
