About the card that's open to third party developers... that was what the TCE Powercore cards were supposed to be. You might remember there is a Virus plug-in for it, that runs off the DSP on the PCI card or FireWire unit. But TCE stopped production on the product, not sure why. The Virus plug-in was based on the features on an early model (Virus A or B I guess), and supposedly for all practical purposes was just like having Virus integration that actually worked. Anyone have any info on why progress on this ceased? It would be really unfortunate for those who invested heavily in them (as I recall they weren't cheap, and you had to pay for each Virus instance you wanted loaded, for example four instances were the equivalent of having four Virus keyboards but the license cost was x4 as well, in addition to the hardware Powercore itself).
What's funny is that throughout all this, GPUs have made insane progress over the past five years, achieving the type of performance gains that CPUs used to, but what's more is they excel at parallel operations, the one thing that CPUs can do, obviously, just apparently not as well as GPUs do. Toolkits like CUDA SDK for NVidia chipsets allow writing pretty much any sort of application that runs on the GPU and utilizes that instead of the CPU. I'd hazard a guess that the average low-end gaming GPU (think $100 graphics card) has the computational power to run circles around the DSPs used in devices like the Virus (although it's a little hard to compare them on paper).
I really don't know why the GPU is so under-utilized in audio processing. It is an amazing hardware resource that all but the lowest-end desktops and most laptops already have inside the box. It could be because the GPU market is split (unevenly I might add) between offerings from NVidia and AMD, although NVidia has been the clear leader for some time and I believe has greater market share. I know there were a few plug-ins available that ran on CUDA, I actually downloaded and tried a convolution reverb plug-in that never seemed to take off.
You can see some of the non-gaming related audio & video apps that run on CUDA rather than the CPU here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda-ap...=Video & Audio