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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Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, maker of cellular phones and wireless broaband cards, recently announced a new wireless broadband deviced with a USB interface.

The Sony Ericsson MD300 is the joint venture's newest wireless broadband device which is capable of supporting multiple types of wireless networks within a module the size of a USB "thumb" drive. The USB interface makes it easy for users with laptops and other mobile devices to access the internet wherever they go.

The MD300 features a USB 2.0 interface with an integrated antenna. The MD300 supports triple-band HSDPA/UMTS networks (850/1900/2100MHz) and quad-band EDGE/GPRS networks (850/900/1800/1900MHz). Data downoad speeds of up to 3.6Mbps can be achieved while on the HSDPA network.

Other features of the MD300 include 128MB of addressable memory that includes drivers and software for Microsoft Windows which should make installation quick and simple. The specifications also lists a multi-color LED similar to a network or USB activity light and Sony Ericsson update services (for possible updates to software/hardware firmware). For aesthetics, the MD300 will come in black and silver finishes but the option will ultimately depend on which wireless carriers will offer the hardware.

Pricing information for the MD300 has not yet been announced but we can expect this device to be available in the first few months of the 2008 calendar year.

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