NVIDIA and Dell announced today that NVIDIA’s Tesla GPU computing processor is now available pre-integrated in several of Dell’s Precision Workstations. This gives supercomputing aficionados – or folks who just like to crank a lot of numbers – some serious power on their desktops. For the uninitiated, GPUs, like those found in consumer video cards, can do a lot more than just make Halo look really good on an LCD. These processors are massively parallel and specially optimized to crunch numbers. They perform this task much (much) better than general-purpose processors from AMD or Intel. We’re not talking just minor performance improvements; on particular jobs, a GPU will outperform a CPU by orders of magnitude – and at a much lower cost than a comparable CPU solution. We expect to see more of these hybrid architectures in which an industry-standard server is combined with a sophisticated and speedy GPU. This is already commonplace in financial firms, the oil and gas industries, and electronic design. But we believe, in line with our Age of Analytics thesis, that more and more businesses will unlock the potential of predictive analytics and begin crunching and analyzing huge data sets with the idea of finding interrelationships that were heretofore unknown. While some may do it for fun, most will do it for profit. And they’ll be able to wield those results like a weapon and smite their competitors before they even know what hit them.