AMD and NVIDIA both are looking to expand the GPU into uses other than gaming. When ATI announced Folding@home would run on its GPUs end-users began to see the potential in GPUs for things other than video games.

NVIDIA first announced its Tesla line of general purpose graphics processing units or GPGPU in June of 2007 with the launch of the Tesla C870, S870 and D870 products. At the core, most of the products were NVIDIA 8-series graphics cards minus the DVI outputs for sending graphics to the display of the PC.

The Tesla C870 is a high-end, quad-GPU external system. These Tesla products are used for purposes like medical imaging and render farming because GPUs are more efficient with parallel processing requirements.

AMD has now announced a competing GPGPU, FireStream 9170, which is it billing as the industry’s first GPU with double-precision floating point. The FireStream 9170 is powered by an ATI GPU that is capable of parallel processing with 320 stream cores and 2GB of GDDR3 RAM.

AMD guidance states the card can provide up to 500 GFLOPs of single precision performance. The interface for the FireStream 9170 is PCIe 2.0 x 16 and it is compatible with Windows XP, XP64, Linux 32 and Linux 64.

Not to be outdone NVIDIA announced today that it would be showing the world its first glimpse at the new Tesla S870 GPU cluster at the SuperComputing 2007 show in Reno, Nevada next week. NVIDIA says Tesla is delivering enormous speed increases across many compute-heavy fields such as finance, oil and gas.

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