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ATI, the graphics division of AMD, has been working to spread its Stream GPGPU technology, which helps speed up applications by exploiting the parallel nature of its GPU products. Since ATI is a part of AMD, Stream has been designed to work with the CPU, instead of exclusively offloading all work onto the GPU. Signal processing, financial analysis, and protein modeling are just some of the fields that Stream can help.

Video transcoding is one of the most CPU intensive tasks, especially when converting high definition video. ATI has been working on this problem for a while, and has released its ATI Video Converter which can use Stream technology. UVD2 Fast Decode and GPU Scaling will be available for the entire Radeon HD 4000 series of graphics cards. GPU encoding in parallel stages will not be available in 45xx and 43xx cards due to bandwidth limitations, but all other 4000 series cards support it as well.

http://www.dailytech.com/madshrimps/article15264.htm

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