GPUs aren't worth their weight in gold – it just feels like they are

For as long as I have been a reporter and analyst in the IT sector, November has always been supercomputing month. Way before there was a TOP500 ranking of supercomputers in June 1993 but just as I was leaving university, the first Supercomputing Conference was held in Orlando in 1988. And that November SC show set the cadence for high-performance computing for the decades that followed.

With the original SC conference, just under 1,500 people and 36 companies showed up. This time around, more than 16,500 people attended SC25 in St. Louis, Missouri, and 559 exhibitors were hawking their wares. As our HPC pal Dan Olds quipped at dinner, of those 559 companies, 732 of them were showing off plumbing to keep GPU-accelerated systems from melting.

This being the HPC crowd, high-precision FP64 floating point computing is still an important aspect of the systems that run all manner ...