Is Your Computer Secretly A Supercomputer?

I can't describe how skeptical I am of this:

The most powerful computing device in your PC may not be that dual-core processor, but your average graphics card. Interest in tapping the hidden processing power in graphics processor has been growing over the past two years, but Peakstream is the first company to actually offer a solution to create a supercomputer based on graphics cards.

Peakstream claims that it has developed a new software platform that can create supercomputers by combining the processing capability of common CPUs with the resources of modern graphics cards. Simply by adding the horsepower of graphics cards to an existing computer, the company claims that the original system can be accelerated by a factor of 20x.

-- The hidden potential in your graphics card: A supercomputer? | TG Daily

It goes on for a short while - but the short version is that your computer could be spending all those pixel pushing bits of silicon to think smarter about things when it's ... well, not pushing pixels.

Since most people reading this would want to use a supercomputer to play Quake anyway, I'm thinking there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem here.


tagged: computing, gaming