Jen-Hsun Huang stated over at the GPU Technology Conference that CUDA (the general-purpose computing language for NVIDIA GPUs) will be ported directly to x86 chips. The approach developed with the Portland Group will let systems without NVIDIA cards handle the code. It will work best with multi-core processors and is seen as ideal for servers.

A timetable isn't yet available for when CUDA will be ready to make the switch or which platforms will have direct access to x86. Both Mac OS X and Windows have native CUDA support and may get the added support relatively soon.

The move is potentially a hedge against universal standards. Both Microsoft's DirectCompute and the more universal OpenCL don't require a graphics chipset to run. Concepts of general-purpose computing languages came about to help calculate physics and other advanced math in parallel rather than depend solely on a single stream of code.

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