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by astrodust 4998 days ago
If by "expensive" you mean "time-consuming to implement algorithms on" then, yes, GPGPU is still expensive. The cards themselves, though, are stupidly cheap. For $140 you can get a card with 700+ general purpose shaders that run at around 800MHz.
1 comments

Yes, they are relatively cheap on their own, the only problem is the added cost of a discrete card in addition to a cpu, and potentially a better power supply to support them both. In terms of many people's budgets it is nothing, but I am talking more about the average consumer. In the end, buying a desktop with a decent discrete GPU and CPU is probably going to run you at least $800; again, not a lot, but if this company could offer a competitive solution for $100, it could drive more "mainstream" adoption, although that is probably wishful thinking at this point.
Don't forget that nearly all Intel desktop CPUs come bundled with some kind of embedded GPU. It's nowhere near as powerful as a separate GPU chip, but it's still able to do OpenCL. The Intel HD4000 GPU may not be state of the art, but it out-performs the CPU for GPGPU-type operations.