Speeding up computational heavy software by replacing traditional CPUs with other types of programmable devices is becoming a more and more viable technique. GPUs, FPGAs and Cell processors, which are the most common ones, offer tremendous computing power, at lower cost and at lower power consumption than CPUs. Their supporting eco-systems have also matured considerable over the last years, making them increasingly interesting not just for experimental systems, but for a broad range of real life applications. This presentation will make a survey of the different technologies, of available hardware solutions and available programming tools.