Basically, the cards are designed to do a particular kind of mathematics very very quickly indeed, and those mathematics are heavily involved in Financial equations as well, for example, working out where 2 projection lines cross in a financial model is not a million miles from finding out where 2 vectors intersect in a 3D Graphics environment.

 GPUs do a lot of floating point calculations, which most financial data is composed of. So they are ideal for crunching this type of data.

Yea, but as far as I know they aren't widespread yet. What I was meaning is that in a few years it wouldn't surprise me if Cell processors became a dominant force in the server world. It only makes sense that IBM would use, and most likely convert to solely using, them over time since they were a major player in their developement.

I just have a feeling we'll start seeing other companies using them as well. For instance, Cisco might start using them in routers or we'll be able to build our own Cell-based servers like we can with Opterons and the like. Of course, homebrew servers using Cell processors is a bit of a stretch for the time being at least, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if I saw a major IT company like Cisco pick up on them for use in large scale routers, such as core routers, over the next couple years.