San Jose Mercury News

San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Beyond just jazzing up video games, one of the growing array of applications being found for the powerful graphics-oriented chips that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices sell is in speeding up medical imaging, which can be a lifesaving benefit.

Using the kind of microprocessor that runs most personal computers and many medical gadgets, it would take an hour to produce a three-dimensional picture of a breast scanned by an ultrasound imaging device being developed by TechniScan, according to Jim Hardwick, a software engineer with the Salt Lake City company.

But with an advanced graphics chip made by Santa Clara-based Nvidia, he said, it takes about half that time.

Hardwick, who participated in a demonstration of several technologies enhanced by graphics chips at Nvidia’s headquarters, said it’s important for doctors and their patients to get the results of such scans as quickly as possible.

Traditionally, most brainy computing tasks were done by microprocessors, also known as central processing units, or CPUs, which are mostly sold by Intel of Santa Clara. Graphics chips were seen as accessories, providing pretty pictures.

But in the past decade, a new kind of graphics chip — known as a graphics processing unit or GPU — has been developed to challenge the CPUs as well as Intel’s dominance in the high-performance chip market.

Sold predominately by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices of Sunnyvale, GPUs have far more individual computing engines, or cores, than CPUs. That allows the GPUs to process multiple streams of data simultaneously, which makes them quicker at handling certain tasks than CPUs.

Indeed, a study last year by University of Pittsburgh researchers found that an Nvidia GPU produced much speedier computerized-tomography images of lung cancer than was possible with a CPU. Sanford Russell, general manager of an Nvidia business unit exploring new uses for GPUs, said the chips are in several medical-imaging devices already being sold.