Nvidia launched the stand-alone GPU-centric computer business all by its lonesome, with today's announcement of a kind of computer system specifically designed to mesh graphics processors together to perform rich math functions.

The goal of nVidia's new Tesla computer is over 2,000 gigaflops in a system that meshes together four GPUs in parallel, each of which contains not two, not four, but 128 pipeline processors. By comparison, a 4P dual-core Itanium-based server (eight cores total) registers about 45 gigaflops in recent LINPACK tests.

The secret is that these GPUs aren't working in place of CPUs. They can't, because their instruction sets are not compatible. Applications have to be written in C and compiled the old-fashioned way, for execution through an operating system driver that dispatches math instructions to the GPU cluster's multiple pipelines. NVidia already produces tools for compiling C applications for GPU execution, using what the company calls CUDA architecture.

The first Tesla units are scheduled to go on sale this August. The Tesla will support 32- and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 3, 4, and 5; 32- and 64-bit SUSE Enterprise Linux versions 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3; and 32-bit Windows XP (curiously not 64-bit yet, and not Vista).