The use of the GPU to service computation instead of rendering video game images is an innovative use of a specialized processor. The GPU is to SIMD processors what Beowulf was to vector and MPP systems. Existing GPU’s are not equivalent to SIMD, as indicated in Suda et al’s 2009 article. (Suda, et al., 2009) However, the low cost CMOS solution has potential to be developed into a replacement, much like Beowulfs replaced vector-processing machines.
