As a group, geeks get excited over things that tend to leave the rest of the population scratching their heads in confusion but only because they can’t follow what is being discussed.  Take for instance Josh’s excitement at getting an inside scoop on the saga of BFG, Best Buy and AMD and the licensing agreement that is tearing them apart. 

As interesting as that information is it is a subplot in our serial, the main thread is the emergence of GPGPU’s and the drama of AMD and nVIDIA.  The Inquirer takes a long look at what the market is currently like, as we have new Fermi based Tesla HPC cards coming from nVIDIA and AMD’s Firestream series has recently had an update as well.  The hardware is certainly one aspect of our plot, with nVIDIA having better performance but at the cost of power savings, whereas AMD can offer a card that may not be as fast but has a TDP about half of a Tesla card.  Software is also a major player in this drama, with nVIDIA’s closed source but provably powerful CUDA versus the open sourced OpenCL promoted by AMD and others.  Will AMD bow and license CUDA in a repeat of OpenGL versus DirectX or shall we see a new plot line come out of this clash?  Stay tuned and keep current with our Podcast, your cheat sheet to the wild world of tech.


"GRAPHICS CARDS are no longer just graphics cards thanks to Nvidia, but the firm that brought graphics chips to the server room is for the first time about to face some serious competition.

In the past five years we here at The INQUIRER have called Nvidia many things, however the accolade of high performance computing (HPC) innovator is also applicable. The company’s focus on producing general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) has lowered the cost barrier to HPC, allowing small companies, researchers and even hobbyists access to serious computing power."

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