Deep Learning Drives Nvidia's Tesla Business To New Highs

It is a coincidence, but one laden with meaning, that Nvidia is setting new highs selling graphics processors at the same time that SGI, one of the early innovators in the fields of graphics and supercomputing, is being acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Nvidia worked up from GPUs for gaming PCs to supercomputers, and has spread its technology to deep learning, visualization, and virtual desktops, all with much higher margins than GPUs for PCs or any other client device could deliver. SGI, in its various incarnations, stayed at the upper echelons of computing where there is, to a certain extent, less maneuvering room and more intense competition. In fact, systems using Nvidia's GPU motors have given the shared memory and clusters – many of the latter using Nvidia's Tesla accelerators to improve their computational efficiency – made by SGI a run for the money. SGI is no doubt wishing it had made GPUs for all kinds of devices and had transformed its OpenCL environment into something akin to CUDA.