Nvidia is in a better position than some might think to open said "can of whoop ass."

Intel wants to move to raytracing to take advantage of it's upcoming multi-core CPUs since raytracing is highly a parallel task. In the realm of parallel computing nvidia is already king. Like Jim said, it's called CUDA and it allows people to write C programs to run on the GPU. Game physics, video encoders/decoders, and scientific and engineering simulations are already being ported to CUDA. In some cases users see a 10x performance increase compared to the CPU version.

Intel is the company playing catch-up here. They've been stuck in a single threaded world for too long; now they're worried about how to effectively program their multi-core CPUs of the future.

cool!

cool design!

If you're going to be playing any HD video off of that I'd recommend downloading the CoreAVC codec. It does a much better job of playing H.264 than FFDShow on older systems. Also if you have a supported nvidia gpu in there you can get their codec to allow the video card decode MPEG2. Other than that, you're pretty much a no go on HD with a CPU that slow. I've got a 2500xp desktop and it's hit and miss with what HD recordings it can play.

Also if you have a firewire port or if you can add one you can capture the MPEG2 transport stream right off your cable's set top box. I think SageTV even has some plugins to allow you to change channels over the firewire cable.

The summary missed the key feature, "the function of checking money with ultraviolet radiaition!" MMM I can finally get a tan from my phone :P