Access to the GPU for compute power is a hot area too.
I notice mention of that, and I have to ask: how does the processing speed of a GPU relate to that of a core of a CPU?Is a GPU effectively an array processor, or suchlike?
CPUs can do pretty much anything, but not so quickly. GPUs can do a limited set of computations, but they're highly parallel vector/matrix processors with massive memory bandwidth. So for those calculations that they can do, they are vastly more powerful than a CPU. Check out the Folding@Home site and see the relative speed of the GPUs involved in the effort.