November 18 - 1:05pm EST   NVIDIA on Tuesday announced the availability of its GPU-based Tesla architecture Personal Supercomputer, which, the company promises, has as much as 250 times the computing performance of a PC thanks to NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture and up to 960 parallel processing cores. Along with its partners, buyers can now opt for desktop PCs with the sort of computing power previously reserved for supercomputing clusters. [full story]

August 22 - 12:50pm EDT   NVIDIA today formally released the finished version of CUDA 2.0. The second generation of the company's general-purpose programming language for its video chipsets supports 64-bit versions of Mac OS X and Windows Vista and adds support for instructions that can help offload more specific tasks from the main processor to the video card, such as 3D textures and hardware-accelerated interpolation of information. [full story]

July 23 - 9:45am EDT   Microsoft's next version of DirectX will have its own alternative to the OpenCL standard proposed by Apple, the company revealed yesterday at its GamesFest conference. DirectX 11 will have support for "compute shader technology" that allows modern, more generalized video cards' effects processors to perform tasks other than rendering video, including physics calculations and other chores that would normally be handled by the main system processor. [full story]

June 17 - 11:40am EDT   The Khronos Group late yesterday established a new alliance between vendors that could see standards for high performance computing such as OpenCL gain a foothold across many operating systems and hardware platforms. Called the Computer Working Group, the team includes graphics rivals 3DLabs, AMD, and NVIDIA, processor makers such as ARM, Freescale, Intel, and Qualcomm, and end product manufacturers such as Motorola and Nokia, all of whom hope to create and maintain genuinely open and royalty-free standards for using newer graphics hardware to process very demanding compute tasks. [full story]

June 16 - 4:30pm EDT   NVIDIA on Monday used the occasion of its GTX 200 introduction to quietly update its Tesla line of workstation processor cards. The T10P chipset added to the cards is virtually identical to the 240-core GTX but is her spun entirely towards accelerating high performance computing tasks such as medical research and very high-level math. The very specialized nature of the chip lets it calculate as much as 900 gigaflops by itself, or 73 percent more than the earlier card it replaces. [full story]