I don't think the physics processing units were ever big. This was mostly just offloading some of their physics processes from the CPU to the GPU. It could be seen as a feature of GPUs for games, like ray-tracing acceleration.
That's not what I was referring to. I was talking about NV selling GPGPUs for HPC loads, starting with the Tesla generation. They were mostly used for CFD.
Ah, you're right. Thanks for the correction. But seems like they have applications far beyond CFD if they are what's put in the biggest supercomputers.
CFD is what 90+% of non-AI supercomputer time is spent on. Whether you are doing aerodynamic simulations for a new car chassis, weather forecasting, or testing nuclear weapons in silico, or any of the other of literally hundreds of interesting applications, the computers basically run the same code just with different data inputs.
They still had a boom of being used for a lot of HPC loads, even non-AI supercomputers, although it was quickly dwarfed by their other markets.