title: Is it worth offloading FFT computation to an embedded GPU?
body: <p>We are considering porting an application from a dedicated digital signal processing chip to run on generic x86 hardware.  The application does a lot of Fourier transforms, and from brief research, it appears that FFTs are fairly well suited to computation on a GPU rather than a CPU.  For example, this page has some benchmarks with a Core 2 Quad and a GF 8800 GTX that show a 10-fold decrease in calculation time when using the GPU:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~pdemores/gpu/" rel="noreferrer">http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~pdemores/gpu/</a></p>
  
  <p>However, in our product, size constraints restrict us to small form factors such as PC104 or Mini-ITX, and thus to rather limited embedded GPUs.</p>
  
  <p>Is offloading computation to the GPU something that is only worth doing with meaty graphics cards on a proper PCIe bus, or would even embedded GPUs offer performance improvements?</p>