I SPENT LAST WEEK taking in information like a sponge, and this week, it's still slowly seeping out. My IDF wrap covered Intel's future directions in processor technology, which had a lot to do with highly parallel floating-point processing. Many of my conversations with folks other than Intel last week touched on this same theme—whether it was about ATI's stream computing initiative, Nvidia's plans to counter, or the battle over gaming physics. Read on for my take on ATI's foray into what it calls stream computing.