Nvidia's product manager for Tesla producs, Sumit Gupta, recently said how new programming environments will utilize GPUs to accelerate software in OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 operating systems. Nvidia seems to be keen on proving the world that graphics cards are not solely for gaming, and thus the GPGPU acronym (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units).

OpenCL, a framework for writing programs which execute across platform containing CPUs, GPUs and potentially other processors, would enable users to more effectively utilize the potential that GPUs obviously pack, and even Apple on its website says that OpenCL will make it possible for developers to „efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit.“

In a nutshell, this means that graphics do so much more in the future, as having a CPU and a GPU in your system will mean there're two workhorses to rely on, where both processing units will work together and divide the tasks among themselves. An example was cited as running Google's Picasa on the CPU, but as soon as you choose an image and apply a filter, the GPU would take over.

Since interfaces in our OSs are obviously visual, it would make more sense for the GPU to handle it than the CPU Mr. Gupta also said. However, this doesn't in any way mean that CPUs are not needed as he also added how „If you're running an unpredictable task, the CPU is the jack of all trades“.

More here.