*Source: BetaNews (
http://www.betanews.com/article/NVid...r/1182376593)*
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While ATI and its newfound parent AMD continue discussing the potential benefits of actually pairing their technologies into one cohesive unit, now that their companies have been paired together in a similar fashion, their principal rival in the graphics arena decided it isn't waiting to make a similar play with Intel. NVidia today may have launched the stand-alone GPU-centric computer business all by its lonesome, with today's announcement of a kind of computer system specifically designed to mesh graphics processors together to perform rich math functions.
The goal of nVidia's new Tesla computer, if it can be believed, is nothing short of staggering: over 2,000 gigaflops - billions of floating-point operations per second - in a system that meshes together four GPUs in parallel, each of which contains not two, not four, but 128 pipeline processors. If this is true, nVidia has surged all the way into multi-teraflop territory with a device that fits into a 1U package. By comparison, a 4P dual-core Itanium-based server (eight cores total) registers about 45 gigaflops in recent LINPACK tests.
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