Intel Clarkdale Gets GPGPU Support; Video encoding achieved through task distribution among ten graphics engines

Intel Clarkdale Gets GPGPU Support; Video encoding will be achieved through task distribution
Video encoding will be achieved through task distribution among ten graphics engines

General-purpose processing of graphics processing units (GPGPU) is the way where processes in the CPU are offloaded to the GPU, letting the GPU to perform complex computation that would normally be handled by the CPU. This is a good way of capitalizing the power of teh GPU to help in the processing of complex data.

Intel recently announced that its next-generation graphics circuits, which will be part of the Clarkdale CPU, would include support for GPGPU on video transcoding. Both the dual core Arrandale (mobile) and Clarkdale (desktop) will be announced on Jan 7 2010. Both chips has dual core 32nm processor and a 45nm graphics core on the same PCB. The processor supports 4MB of cache, dual channel DDR3 and HyperThreading technology.

The Clarkdale would be able to handle video encoding tasks through a update of the driver to distribute the tasks to the 10 graphics processing engines.

In fact, transcoding of video has already been available on standalone graphics cards and integrated graphics chipsets from AMD (ATI) and NVIDIA for some time.