The future of the low-cost GPU landscape

I came across this article in something called the International Science and Grid This Week (iSGTW) where the author speculates that the introduction of chips such as Sandy Bridge (Intel) and Llano (AMD) in mid 2011 may mean the end to cheap supercomputing based on GPUs. It is an interesting point of view but I do not completely agree. The point is that these chips will eat a large piece out of the low end GPU market that NVIDIA currently holds. By reducing the revenues of this segment the higher end CUDA devices will increse in cost (the author speculates with a 10x figure based on a QS22 to PS3 price comparison). Thus, he concludes, the era of cheap GPU-based supercomputing is coming to an end.

Even if this were to happen, certainly the performance difference between the lower-end and higher-end GPU devices is probably much smaller than 10x. Nothing precludes institutions from building GPU-based clusters from smaller and cheaper devices (ie, same philosophy as Blue Gene). Thus it seems to me the price tag would still not be paid. On the other hand, in this situation we might see clusters from Sandy Bridges and Fusion chips, which would fall in this very same category. It will be interesting to observe how this proceeds in the future.