An article at Wired News explains how raw processing power is moving to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). For Aperture and for the Mac in general this is good news: image processing is handled by the GPU where ever possible and increasingly any parallelizable math will be too. Future hardware will see tremendous gains in performance beyond CPU speed increases.

There is a technical article about NVidia's Geforce 8800 at EETimes. The design of graphics processors has moved from being hard-coded to configurable to programmable to now to fully programmable -- a C compiler is available. At 681 million transistors it is one of the largest chips ever made, bigger than the biggest CPUs by several times.

Tags: Aperture, Performance