Just read this at my favorite hardware site, Tom’s Hardware (although I’m not so happy with their new look and feel). AMD is showing off their upcoming uber enthusiast platform which includes dual Agena FX quad-core processors and their (or ATI’s, I’m still finding the new world order there weird) R600 multi-thread (320?) stream processor GPU based graphics card.

The demo was doing real-time face recognition on passers-by. It really shows that what used to be done as batch jobs can now be done in real-time with consumer massively parallel systems. We always wonder why we need more horse power – my web browser is working fine on my 3 year old system at home. But I think we’re hitting a tipping point for a number of really cool applications that will change the way Joe Consumer looks at computers.

Which makes me even more excited to get into the raytracing hobby time project I’ve started to show off the CDT as an IDE for “really cool stuff”. Now, to figure out how to get one of these machines 🙂