the Cloud, the Smart Phone, and the GPU

Clouds, and mobile computing, especially smart phones have been some of the hottest topics in tech for quite a while and aren't expected to give up their spots any time soon. Some of the major selling points of the cloud are that it's decentralized, hardware independent, and supports thin clients (i.e. a web browser is all you need). It's easy to imagine how major improvements in these areas will mean major improvements for smart phones, or any portable computing device. But It's important to remember that the hardware independence is only for the user. The amount of hardware needed to keep a cloud afloat is enormous. General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware[GPGPU] promises the most dramatic speed ups in computation power in decades, and at a fraction of the cost and power consumption. In the chart below you can see the red line[GPU performance] is growing exponentially compared to the blue line [CPU performance] over the past decade. The list of software applications that are engineered to take advantage of GPU performance leaps is also growing exponentially. It's no longer just gamers or artists who benefit from high end graphics cards, because they are no longer exclusively for graphics. The slightly higher price of a computer with a high end graphics card, and the level of IT knowledge required to really understand what you are really getting has hampered some of the marketing potential of these new super processors. However, the Cloud is offering regular people the ability to take advantage of the latest and greatest simply by subscribing. A person using a cloud service never has to worry about a hard drive crash or an over heating processor. Top of the line applications are just there, and they just work. Major designers of high end graphics cards are AMD/ATI, IBM, Intel, and last but not least Nvidia. In fact Nvidia recognized the potential for mainstream GPGPU speed ups before any of its rivals, and has positioned itself to make sure that it benefits from it. There are lots of technical explanations and examples of why/how Nvidia is ahead of the other graphics chip makers, but the fundamental difference is that they were on board with GPGPU 10 years ago, and the other companies are struggling to even compete. The fact is that more powerful computers are needed, one of the major reasons now is to build a more powerful and energy efficient backbone of the Cloud, and Nvidia is currently the company that would capitalize from this the most by far. The financial fundamentals of Nvidia make it far from a good deal, but the potential for an explosion in the demand for high performance GPUs make us choose it as a speculative buy.