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But some tasks traditionally handled by the CPU will be shifted over to the GPU--or divvied up, so certain operations are done on the CPU, while others are done on the GPU. "The really interesting thing about OpenCL and DirectX is that OpenCL is going to form part of the Apple operating system (Snow Leopard) and DirectX will form part of Windows 7," said Gupta. "And what that essentially means to consumers is, if your laptop has an Nvidia GPU or ATI (AMD) GPU, it will run the operating system faster because the operating system will essentially see two processors in the system. For the first time, the operating system is going to see the GPU both as a graphics chip and as a compute engine," he said.

"For example, when you launch (Google) Picasa, that is completely run on the CPU. (But) the minute you choose an image and apply a filter, that filter should run on the GPU. (This happens) when you have Apple and Microsoft pushing the application developers to do that," Gupta said.