Nvidia Banks on Split-Personality Chip

For now, though, Nvidia appears to be approaching the computing market from another angle.

Nvidia says the GPU computing business will focus on high-performance computing, a market in which multimillion-dollar supercomputers and banks of interconnected servers plow through massive amounts of data to simulate nuclear blasts, uncover oil and gas deposits and run complex financial models.

All those applications require parallel computing, something which graphics processors are inherently good at doing.

Compared to current hardware requirements, the potential to use mass-produced Nvidia graphics chips to do these jobs offers customers a lot of bang for the buck.

"Because the graphics guys are turning out these chips that have a very high inherent floating point capability, and doing it in much higher volumes than any supercomputer could ever think about ... the economics are very compelling," says Nathan Brookwood, a microprocessor analyst with research firm Insight 64.

"If you have a problem that lends itself to lots of computation in parallel, then this is a very cost-effective approach," Brookwood says.

But Wall Street is taking a wait-and-see attitude to the graphics processor's alter-ego.

"It's an intriguing avenue of development," says Stifel Nicolaus analyst Blake Fischer. "The issue is, what is its applicability into the real world? From what we're seeing at this point, we view it as more of a niche product."

Mainstream PC users don't really need parallel processing capabilities, nor is the software that runs on standard PCs optimized to take advantage of parallel processing.