According to John Peddie estimated global graphics chip shipments for 2009 will see the worst ever year-over-year drop in shipments. The decrease 2009 will be even worse than the 2000-20001 recession. However he also says that 2010 promises an amazing comeback. He goes on to say:

“New programming capabilities using OpenCL, DirectX 11, and Nvidia’s CUDA architecture will remove barriers to the exploitation of the GPU as a serious, economical, and powerful co-processor in all level of PCs.”

Certainly the wider availability of OpenCL 1.0 and DX11′s Compute Shaders (with the launch Windows 7), as well as continued developments to CUDA will mean a step change in the number of people who are exposed to applications taking advantage of heterogeneous compute. These technologies will undoubtedly see a proliferation of applications taking advantage of data parallel compute acceleration with OpenCL slowly taking the lead for stand alone applications and DX11′s compute shaders enabling some nifty new tricks and performance improvements for games players.