Irreverence

posted on 04 July 2008 05:52

UPDATED: See below.

Here's a thing: Gigaom has a report  saying 'Nvidia sells its chips to firms such as Atrato and Rackable for corporate consumption.' Nvidia makes GPUs - graphics processing chips - with multiple cores operating in parallel. It's pushing its Tesla products as high-performance computing (HPC) processors.

Could the very fast Atrato boxes get their speed because the main server processor has a helping hand from a parallel processing Nvidia chip? (Nvidia Tesla processor package pictured.)

I looked on the Rackable web site - sure enough Nvidia showed up  as a component of some servers. Eg; The following eight AMD Opteron[TM]-based servers are now also available: * C1001-A03: nVIDIA nForce Pro 2200 chipset, 8 x DDR2 667 memory, 4 x SATA II ports, PCI-E expansion slot ...'

I had a look on the Atrato website and did a look via Google but found nothing. There's an inquiry gone off to Atrato to try and find out more. Intriguing stuff.

UPDATE: Atrato's executive team said: "We checked with the right people and Atrato does not presently use NVIDIA chips on their controllers.  They have not ruled anything out and are always looking for the best technologies to enhance their product capabilities."

Nice idea then but completely untrue.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}