Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Quite. GPUs have been merrily parallising a large class of important 
> algorithms for decades now.

  I wonder what gives you that impression.

  The first GPU to support programmable shaders was the GeForce 3 Series,
released in 2001. Back then support for implementing more-or-less generic
algorithms with these shaders was very limited.

  As programmable shader languages were improved, the possibilities
increased, and there were quite many "hacks" to make programmable shaders
do something else than to paint pixels, but it probably was not until CUDA
was published that there was "official" support for generic algorithm
programming on GPUs. The first GPU supporting CUDA was the GeForce 8800
Series, released in 2006.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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