Nvidia announced that they are bringing a new high-end graphics platform to market in September. The Nvidia Quadro Plex is basically an product that holds up to eight QuadroFX 4500 GPU’s (if using two boxes) outside of your workstation computer. It connects via PCI-Express x16 ports. This level of graphics power has always been only available from Silicon Graphics. SGI has not been doing too well over the last few years. Desktop computer systems have just gotten to the point where they are actually faster than SGI’s machines that cost ten times as much.

The only place in the graphics market that SGI still held strong was the super high end of things; the type of work that requires massive amounts of data to be interacted with in realtime and stored on the graphics hardware’s memory. Now, using two Nvidia Quadro Plex II’s, you can have up to 4GB of RAM on the hardware itself and a massive amount of GPU power to go along with it. It looks like this is definitely the end of SGI’s place in the graphics market, at least for now. I bet this box makes for a killer gaming system too, ha.