Despite the earnest pitches from nVidia and AMD’s ATI, mainstream vendors have been reluctant to include graphical processors in their high-end servers. But one those vendors has seen its luck turn. IBM has announced plans to include nVidia’s Tesla processors in its System x iDataPlex compute-intensive servers. Will Big Blue’s deal with nVidia open the floodgates for more vendors to include GPUs in their compute-intensive servers? Server Watch takes a look.
nVidia and ATI, the graphics arm of AMD, have been promoting their graphics processors as viable alternatives for compute-intensive tasks for some time, but so far, mainstream server vendors have been slow to bite. Until now.
IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced it would include Tesla processors from nVidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) in its System x iDataPlex scale-out servers. The new servers are aimed at organizations that need to run tasks with massive amounts of mathematical computation, and while GPUs — short for graphics processing units — have been generally used to render advanced 2D and 3D graphics, at their heart, they’re essentially floating point processors with hundreds of cores interconnected to do math computation.
