Attack of the Killer GPUs

After reading about the latest PlayStation, XBox, GameCube, etc. I was struck by how much raw processing power these machines have and how they manage to deliver such massively parallel computing at relatively low prices. For example, according to an article I read recently in Popular Science, the latest PlayStation sports nine dual-core processors, Rambus XDR RAM (apparently supporting data rates of 25.6 GB/sec) and a Rambus IO chip that supposedly moves data around at 76.8 GB/sec! All for what, a couple of hundred dollars?

Of course these machines sell in the millions and you pay through the nose for the games themselves but even still.

Then this morning, my brother forwarded me a link to an interesting article on Nvidia:

…in a recent contest to build the world’s fastest database server, the winner was a university professor who ported SQL software to run on an Nvidia GPU…

I can’t vouch for the facts of said article but if that quote is anything to go by, maybe all that wasted (oops I mean un-tapped) processing power might get some interesting use.