Filed under: Desktops

We know the past couple years haven’t been kind to VIA-owned S3 Graphics — market share has declined, and NVIDIA and ATI keep introducing fancy new technologies, making it tough to keep up. That said, we’re inspired by S3’s ardent attempts to stay relevant in an industry that won’t easily make room for small competitors. The latest case in point: the company has released a photo-editing app to demonstrate the newly-programmed GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) functionalities of its DirectX 10.1 Chrome 400 line of discrete graphics cards. S3 claims its hard work has produced an HPC environment that can be used to reduce processing time for scientific and other applications from days to seconds — we’ll believe it when we see it, but you’ve gotta admire the tenacity.

[Via CustomPC]

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

NVIDIA’s Tesla GPU-based high-performance computing workstations and add-in cards have been on the market for a whole year now, and to celebrate, they’re getting birthday cake, balloons, and an upgrade to GT200-based chipsets. Like AMD’s recently-announced FireStream 9250, the new T10P processing units are capable of breaking the teraflop barrier, up from the first gen’s paltry 518 GFlops, and they’re up to 240 cores from the first gen’s 128. You’ll have to shell out to get all that horsepower, though: the entry-level, 900GFlops C1060 PCI card will sell for $1699, while the four-GPU 1U S1070 blade will sell for $7995 for two PCIe-interface version or $8295 for the single PCIe connect model. The standalone Tesla workstation has been discontinued, as customers were increasingly buying the cards, so it looks like those are really fast collectors’ items for now. So, who’s going to be the first to add one of these bad boys to the Engadget Folding@Home team?

[Via Tom’s Hardware, thanks Matan]

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Filed under: Desktops

Off hand, we can’t think of how we’d truly utilize the horsepower generated by a 72-processor cluster shoved into a “whisper-quiet, low-power deskside cabinet,” but we’d happily draw up a plan if forced. SiCortex — the same folks who delivered the bicycle-powered supercomputer — has introduced its new SO072 Catapult, which features a standard Linux environment, 48GB of RAM and a trio of (optional) PCIExpress slots. This aptly categorized high performance computer (HPC) sucks down less than 200-watts of power, sports a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports and has room for six internal hard drives. Reportedly, each of the 12 SC072 nodes is a multi-core chip with six CPU cores, and while $15,000 may seem steep for your average tower, we’d say this is a pretty good value considering the hardware.

[Via Gadgetopia]

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