Re:I'm not a computer scientist, and... (Score 1)

"When your problem domain & data are able to be run in parallel then GPU's totally kick a CPU's in terms of processing power AND in price. i.e.
An i7 3770K costs around $330. Price/Core is $330/8 = $41.25/core
A GTX Titan costs around $1000. Price/Core is $1000/2688 = $0.37/core"

That's a very unfair comparison. For one the i7-3770k has SIMD as well (8-wide AVX). A better comparison is maximum GFLOPs/s.
The max for the 3700k is frequency * 8 (AVX) * 2(simultaneous multiplication and addition) * 4 cores. Let's assume the frequency is 4.0 GHz (base turbo is 3.8 - mine is overclocked to 4.4). That's 256 SP (single precision) GFLOPs/s and 128 DP (double precision) GFLOPs/s. According to wikipedia the Titan can do 4500 SP GFLOPs/s and 1300 DP GFLOPs/s. That's 19x as many SP GFLOP/s and 10x as many DP GFLOPs. In USD that's 6x as many SP GFLOPs/s per USD and 3x as many DP GFLOPs/s per USD.

When Haswell comes out in June the max will double due to FMA3. That means the Titan will deliver 3x SP GFLOPs/s per USD and only 1.5x DP GLOPs/s per USD. Hawell's DP performance and price will already be better than the GK 104 chip (GTX 680). However, AMD Radeon will still have an advantage in performance and performance/price both for SP and DP.

Likely the student who made his/her database on the GPU did not optimize the CPU code because if he/she did the advantage would have been a lot less that 70x.