Thats been out for a while now, but im still sure the Nvidia quadro series is better for workstations for 3D design

http://www.nvidia.com/page/quadrofx_family.html

but im happy with my 8800GTS :3

NVIDIA Quadro's are very nice, great responses from them, but then again there had better be, considering what they cost. though if you really need one of them, the price isn't that huge of an issue, because its almost certainly a work expense. :P

They've been able to use GPUs for processing for a while now. For example, there's a temporal convolution filter called 'FFT3DGPU' that uses your GPU to do postprocessing for a video (with AviSynth). All sorts of things can be done with GPUs.

Yeah, ATI graphics cards can accelerate Folding@Home, I think, several dozen times as powerful as a desktop CPU. The whole GPGPU (general purpose GPU) thing is pretty interesting, I'm curious as to how far people will be able to take it.

'course nVidia wants to see the downfall of the CPU... they don't make 'em! Intel wants the downfall of the GPU, because they don't make any, and AMD wants both to continue to thrive, because they make both. Companies are so silly :3

I do have to wonder how well ATI/AMD GPUs could be adapted to things like that... I know they used to have up to 32 connected to get sick levels of anti-aliasing in military simulators, and they now support up to 4 in desktops. Hmm... time will tell.

Isn't that the one that can crack Windows NTLM passwords in three to five days?

I just want more RAM >w>

Firestream with the R600 series is even more powerful than that...
in fact, various reviews makes the quadro look ashamed of their "super computer" thing :P
and also firestream can go up to 5 cards in a single computer ;)
plus external connectors just like twile mentioned.
but you know how adverticement gets.

It's for render farms.

Five hundred billion floating point operations in a second... So this is like Earth Simulator: home edition?
I say we start work on The Oracle and/or Deep Thought.

It's rather interesting. The GPU speeds and graphics memory speeds haven't been subjec to the Moore's Law that CPUs and traditional RAM have. They're multiplying at a really amazing rate, and have started to become useful for many formerly CPU-farm-intensive things.

Looks pretty cool. I can imagine how physicists at CERN would be putting this to use while they're smashing subatomic particles together.

I want one. Let's say that. No, not just the GPU, I also want CERN. XD

Wooo, have your own ultra rare synthisized particles!

I want to make antimatter. XD

I saw one of the desktop ones supporting a table at a trade show a couple weeks ago. Thing looked pretty awesome.

The demo itself was streaming a CAD application over the network to some dinky little laptop with onboard video, with all the point calculations done server side.

Having unique hardwear gets you attention.