Ars has a really interesting article on Intel's Larrabee GPU products. They are initially to be sold as gaming GPU's but they are in fact programmable co-processor cores (think of them as Pentium chips on a graphics card) with their own operating system. The fact that Larrabee has its own operating system and is programmable means that the host operating system will be able to dispatch jobs other than 3D to the GPU.

Intel disclosed a ton of new Larrabee information in a briefing on Friday. Here are the highlights on one of the company's most aggressive architecture changes ever.

Larrabee: Intel's biggest leap since the Pentium Pro

What this means is that eventually the host operating system (i.e. Windows XP or Mac OSX) will be able to use these powerful video cards to offload specialized tasks. I think it also means that eventually the CPU (central processing unit) and GPU (graphics processing unit) will merge and become one massive super powerful unit.