With Nvision '08 now underway, DailyTech have the low-down on CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's keynote, which touched upon Folding and the history of the GPU.

News.com quotes Huang saying, "It is not about replacing the CPU at all. We don't believe that replacing the CPU is a good strategy. Supplementing the CPU is far better."

One impressive figure that Huang tossed out during his keynote had to do with the Folding@home program. Huang says that in total there are 2.6 million PCs running the folding at home application providing 288 teraflops of processing power. NVIDIA's CUDA based version of Folding@home is running currently on 24,000 GPUs -- only 1% of the total processors available with the application.

That 1% of GPUs running the application provides 1.4 petaflops of performance amounting to five times the processing power of all CPUs available to the project says Huang. Huang also shared the stage with Peter Stevenson of Realtime Technologies reports News.com. Realtime Technologies demonstrated real-time ray tracing that can render 3D graphics with very complex light interactions -- presumably on NVIDIA GPUs.

After the ray tracing demo, a demo from Microsoft showed off its new Photosynth application. DailyTech first reported on Photosynth in 2006. Huang also showed a 3D stereoscopic graphics demonstration using the NVIDIA Medusa demo and Age of Empires. Imagine 3D gaming on your PC with the same quality as 3D films in movie theaters like Beowulf. This is some of the most exciting work NVIDIA is doing right now.