"What do Nvidia and Canada have in common? No, it's not ATI definitely - it's become AMD now anyway. Rather, it is nearly US$ (not CAN$) three million just poured by Nvidia into a tiny Canadian outfit called Acceleware Corp, based in cold Calgary. Acceleware is heavily involved in high-performance computing tasks acceleration using Nvidia GPUs, mainly for the electromagnetic (cellphone, microwave, IC), seismic (oil exploration - remember the company's location!), biomedical, industrial and military markets. They argue that, for many of these apps, the acceleration possible on specific tasks can reach between 10x and 40x - and that was on accelerator cards similar to the old 7900GTX. The new G80 generation should provide further boost.

The Nvidia investment may change that - the 'greens' need a software partner who can rapidly turn out some kind of more mainstream yet highly optimised NV-based FP processing for anything from ray-traced rendering for movies to genomics or financial modeling. Once the FP portion is fixed and the brand is accepted on more programmers' desks this way, Nvidia can start focusing on the general-purpose integer portion - fixing the X86 execution compatibility, the next step towards having its own ultrafast CPU solution soon."

Nvidia has seen its portfolio increase into a number of different markets besides graphics card processing units within the past decade. From being a supplier of chipsets, workstation suites and game consoles to multimedia devices with its acquisition of PortalPlayer and now mainstream processing units dedicated to a variety of tasks. Perhaps it was only inevitable, or perhaps it was AMD Fusion?

The Inquirer