S3 Graphics illustrates GPGPU with S3FotoPro

Posted on Friday, October 17 2008 @ 17:11 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA and ATI aren't the only ones toying with GPGPU, S3 Graphics today unveiled an application that uses their Chrome 400 series GPUs to boost image enhancement. The firm claims their GPUs are more than 100x faster in S3FotoPro than the fastest processors:
S3 Graphics, a leading provider of graphics and HD Multimedia technologies, today announced the availability of S3FotoPro™, a GPGPU application using the latest programmable architecture powered by the Chrome 400 Series GPUs. Utilizing an array of S3 stream processors, the GPUs can accelerate parallel data workloads and perform work on thousands of concurrent threads to achieve Gigaflops (GFLOPS) of high-throughput computations.

S3FotoPro™ is an example of a computationally expensive process for image quality improvements that is best achieved on a GPU instead of a CPU due to the S3 stream processor architecture. The algorithm complexity and high calculation requirements required by S3FotoPro™ enables the parallel workload speedup to be magnitudes (>100x) of times faster than the latest CPUs in the market today. In addition, the GFLOPS-per-Watt and GFLOPS-per-Dollar favor the GPU computational efficiency over standard CPU calculations.

“S3 Graphics continues to develop and bring to market cutting edge technologies that use the power of the GPU to meet new demands in emerging computation-intensive markets. Application processes that required days can now be completed in seconds using a GPGPU product like ours,” said Michael Shiuan, VP of Hardware Engineering at S3 Graphics. “With support for the latest GPGPU applications and languages, S3FotoPro provides a highly useful and versatile tool for end-users and our partners.”

“Markets that can benefit from S3 Graphics GPGPU technology include High-Performance Computing (HPC), HD video transcoding/encoding, scientific, engineering, medical, imaging, physics, and many other areas,” said Dr. Ken Weng, GM for S3 Graphics. “The potential and opportunities to leverage this novel technology are just starting to open up and the full potential has yet to be realized.”
S3FotoPro can be downloaded over here.



About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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