CUDA: In-depth Test

The French website Hardware.fr released an deep analysis of CUDA, the well known forthcoming parallel computing solution from NVidia, aiming to take advantage of the unused processing power of the GPU.
AS expected from the first public beta version, the technology is powerful and delivers performance gain ranging easily from 7 to 14 fold (depending on the graphic card and GPU, and on applications), when compared to the processing power of a Core 2 Duo CPU. Of course, CUDA does not speed up all applications, but software coded to benefit from this technology will have their performance level dramatically raised up leaving competitors in the dust. So, CUDA might become the new Grail for NVidia if developers are ready to invest time and resources in optimizing their codes. In 2009, Intel should release its first massively multicore solution, based on Larrabee, and we should be able to compare both technologies.