The first ATI r5xx/6xx X11 driver release

Oh for links  to what I am talking about:

Here is Nvidia's CUDA:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html

> The CUDA Toolkit is a complete software development solution for programming CUDA-enabled
GPUs. The Toolkit includes standard FFT and BLAS libraries, a C-compiler for the NVIDIA GPU
and a runtime driver. The CUDA runtime driver is a separate standalone driver that
interoperates with OpenGL and Microsoft® DirectX® drivers from NVIDIA. CUDA technology is
currently supported on the Linux and Microsoft® Windows® XP operating systems.


ATI's effort is much more friendlier. It's CTM (close-to-metal) were they provide a assembler
programable interface for supported GPUs. It seems that they still had a software shim in
there to hide the video interfaces. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_to_Metal

Arstechnica has some good articles on the subject:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070219-8878.html

AMD/ATI's Fusion is combining CPU/GPU cores into a single proccessor
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061119-8250.html

Intel Larrebee seems to be taking the X86-style proccessor and extending into GPU-land.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070604-clearing-up...
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070917-intel-picks...