Compressing CPU? GPU? RAM?

[kozmik]

Hello, as I wrote in the title, what hardware does compression need the most?

[Joe Forster/STA]

Compression using GPU is not common yet; I rather found papers describing ideas related to it. There's a compromise between CPU and RAM: if you want faster compression and/or better compression ratio, you can either use more CPU's (only possible with multithreaded applications on multicore CPU's) or more RAM (for precomputed data, e.g. hash tables).

Because CPU's are very fast and the core number of CPU's is constantly increasing but RAM's are not getting much faster, I think the future is more CPU usage; see 7-Zip's multithreaded LZMA/LZMA2 compression for an example.