Towards using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for embedded systems

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is becoming a very powerful platform to accelerate graphics and dataparallel compute-intensive applications. It gives a high performance and at the same time it has a low power consumption. This combination is of high performance and low power consumption is useful when it comes to building an embedded system. In this paper we are looking at the possibility to use a combination of CPU and GPU to provide performance metrics that are required in an embedded system. In particular we look at requirements inherent in the process and power industries where we believe that the GPU has the potential to be a useful and natural element in future embedded system architectures.