ATI hopes to attract more developers to ATI Stream with its free software development kit (SDK). A beta of version 1.3 of the Stream SDK was also released Wednesday.

"Video cards can do a lot more than just help you play games," said and CTO for Hewlett-Packard Co.'s high-end desktop and gaming PC business, in a separate interview.

Sood said operating systems, such as Windows 7 and future versions of the Mac OS, are expected to draw upon the untapped power of GPUs. "This is more than a fad, it's an emerging trend."

ATI trails rival Nvidia Inc., which has been pushing its own

Last month, which uses the equivalent of four top-of-the-line GPUs to provide 4 teraflops of performance. Four teraflops is fast enough that this US$10,000 PC would have ranked as one of the 500 fastest computers in the world as recently as several years ago.