Jon Peddie, president of graphics market research firm Jon Peddie Research, called the IBM-Nvidia deal “great news. This is verification and validation of the Tesla product as being a viable server supercomputer accelerator. Having a name like IBM really puts a stamp of approval on it, and you’ll see other companies following that,” he told InternetNews.com. “I expect to see Dell, HP and Sun all doing that. Not necessarily with Tesla, but adding GPU computing.”
It’s also good for Nvidia’s rival, ATI, because it, too, has a strong play. The difference is that ATI supports OpenCL while Nvidia supports OpenCL plus its own CUDA effort. “CUDA is much stronger than OpenCL right now. It has a richer C language and compiler and supports Fortran,” while OpenCL is not as mature and needs some work, Peddie said.
