So lately, everyone has been talking about the new WiiU with officially confirmed specs including the mysterious GPGPU. 

Atleast its a mystery to me. So can someone explain what it is? 

I still don't know either, however, I do plan on reading up on it in the next couple of days.

That's what I usually do when I don't know something, I read about it. But I wouldn't say no to a fellow VGCharter who can come and post it here in simple english for us.

BAM

http://www.gpgpu.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=22165

Basically, it means using the GPU to do CPU stuff.

Yea, basically it allows more flexability, as in a graphically not as taxing games you can make the gpu assist the cpu with certain tasks.

I think the whole matter is more interesting if you have an APU as main processor (that's a CPU with a smaller GPU core on the same die), as in a high end console game the main GPU should be pretty much maxed anyway.

A GPGPU is a General Purpose (computation) GPU.

CPUs and GPUs don't work in the same way and that makes each of them best suited for some tasks than for others. CPUs are superior dealing with sequential data/operations and complex operations while GPUs are better suited to take care of parallel data/processes.

A GPGPU is "only" a GPU that can run other software besides games that benefit from that capacity with parallel computing.

It means they plan to open up the GPU so games can run physics or computational code on it? It's something the new GPU supports that the Wii GPU did not.

But I don't see it happening because the GPU will be maxed out with rendering 1080p.

It's more of a marketing thing than any real information.

Usually it refers to a GPU that has some characteristics that make them suitable to high throughput parallel computation, as full IEEE754 compatibility (the way X86 CPUs represent floating point numbers), branch control, an easy to program for API... AMD used to have an API called "close to the metal" that was a nightmare, nVidia has CUDA that is easier to work with... Apple and the Kronos Workgroup (the people behind OpenGL) are trying to popularize OpenCL, that's what probably WiiU will use.

It means that you can use your GPU to do some work your CPU could be short in computational capabilities, work that can be divided in a huge number of small chunks, lots of threads, as IA or physics work.

I thought I knew. I wasn't close.

GPU lower the work on CPU.


You have to have a good gpu for it to work successfully because you will have bottleneck.