I recently saw a comparison of GPU vs CPU power. While most of us kept the focus on improvements in CPUs from Intel, AMD and IBM, the power of Graphic Processing Units has risen tremendously and in certain areas GPUs are many times more powerful — the scientists started to use this power not just for video games.
The recent announcement from NVIDIA introduces GPUs as an inexpensive way to build massively-parallel computing architectures: http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_43499.html.
For example, the Tesla S870 GPU Computing Server with four GPUs and 128 thread processors per GPU provides over 2 teraflops (4 x 500 gigaflops) of raw processing power. Compare that to the Xeon clusters from Intel delivering "only" 340 gigaflops for approximately the same price.
