CUDA, every mention
41 scenes (2022) · ← back to CUDA
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2022 anyone Ben Gilbert 51David Rosenthal 33Jensen Huang 16
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where CUDA comes up
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 23:02 Ben Gilbert And maybe I'm forgetting the story in its entirety, but I think there was a bet the company moment around programmable shaders, and then a third one around the, like, seven-year investment before the market was there in AI and CUDA and…
Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- ▶ 19:16 Ben Gilbert Because while CUDA development began in 2006,
- ▶ 19:51 Ben Gilbert I searched LinkedIn for people who work at NVIDIA today and have the word CUDA in their title.
- ▶ 19:56 Ben Gilbert There are 1100 employees dedicated specifically to the CUDA platform.
- ▶ 21:33 David Rosenthal In 2006, 2007, 2008, they are pouring a lot of resources into building what will become CUDA that we'll get to in a second.
- ▶ 21:43 David Rosenthal Um, it already is CUDA at this point in time.
- ▶ 25:00 Ben Gilbert Because, and anything that CUDA empowers is not yet a revenue driver, and they've totally taken their eye off of gaming.
- ▶ 26:03 David Rosenthal So instead he goes and builds CUDA and continues to build CUDA.
- ▶ 26:10 David Rosenthal Like we get excited about a lot of stuff on acquired, but I think CUDA is like one of the greatest business stories of the last 10 years, 20 years, more.
- ▶ 27:05 David Rosenthal So what is CUDA?
- ▶ 27:08 David Rosenthal It is NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture.
- ▶ 27:49 Ben Gilbert Super high level application development, you know, really high abstraction layer development for hundreds of industries at this point to communicate down to CUDA, which communicates down to the GPU and everything else that they have done…
- ▶ 28:15 David Rosenthal Ben Thompson had this amazing interview with Jensen on strategy and, uh, Jensen in this interview, I think puts what CUDA is and how important it is.
- ▶ 28:29 David Rosenthal We've been advancing CUDA and the ecosystem for 15 years and counting.
- ▶ 29:47 Ben Gilbert Literally true because most programming languages up to this point and most computing platforms primarily contemplated serial execution of programs, and what CUDA did was it said, you know what, the way that our GPUs work and the way that…
- ▶ 30:18 Ben Gilbert So insanely, or dare I say, embarrassingly parallel, and CUDA is designed for parallel execution from the very beginning.
- ▶ 31:22 David Rosenthal NVIDIA to this day, now this may be changing, we'll talk about this at the end of the episode, has never charged a dollar for CUDA, but anyone can download it, learn it, use it, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, all of this work stand…
- ▶ 32:12 Ben Gilbert So OpenCL is sort of the main competitor at this point, and they do actually let OpenCL applications run on their chips, but nothing in CUDA is available to run elsewhere.
- ▶ 35:29 David Rosenthal They're committed to continuing to invest in CUDA and making general purpose computing on GPU a thing.
- ▶ 47:49 David Rosenthal So AlexNet took these old ideas and it implemented them on GPUs, and to be very specific, it implemented them in CUDA on NVIDIA GPUs.
- ▶ 48:13 David Rosenthal This was the big bang moment for artificial intelligence, and NVIDIA and CUDA were right there.
- ▶ 48:37 Ben Gilbert In fact, they even thought about should we relaunch our GPUs as GP GPUs, general purpose graphics processing units, and of course they decided not to do that, but just built CUDA.
- ▶ 49:43 Ben Gilbert And this ends up being the very core of what becomes CUDNN, which is the library for deep neural networks that's actually baked into CUDA that makes it
- ▶ 57:06 David Rosenthal Well, I think people had just lost trust and interest, you know, after, like, there were so many years of, like, they were so early with CUDA and early, you know, they didn't even know that this, like, they didn't know AlexNet was gonna…
- ▶ 1:20:13 Ben Gilbert Over time they might do some stuff like that, but the thing that they were sort of like, which, which is believable, beating the drum on that the strategy was going to be, is right now our whole business strategy is that CUDA and…
- ▶ 1:21:04 David Rosenthal So they just did GTC at the end of March, the big, uh, developer, the big GPU developer conference that they do every year that they started in 2009 as part of building the whole CUDA ecosystem.
- ▶ 1:21:21 David Rosenthal Three million registered CUDA developers, 450 separate SDKs and models for CUDA.
- ▶ 1:25:33 Ben Gilbert Architecture, systems, data center, CUDA, CUDAX.
- ▶ 1:26:04 David Rosenthal They say that they're gonna start licensing a lot of the software that they make separately, licensing it separate from the hardware, like CUDA.
- ▶ 1:48:47 David Rosenthal This is 15 years of CUDA and the hardware underneath it and the libraries on top of it that Nvidia has built.
- ▶ 1:50:22 Ben Gilbert The whole CUDA investment.
- ▶ 1:51:06 David Rosenthal To the extent that you have lock in to developing on CUDA, which I think a lot of people really have lock in on CUDA, then that's major switching costs.
- ▶ 1:51:17 David Rosenthal Like, if you're gonna boot out NVIDIA, that means you're booting out CUDA.
- ▶ 1:51:21 Ben Gilbert Is CUDA a cornered resource?
- ▶ 1:53:31 Ben Gilbert I don't think it was for CUDA.
- ▶ 1:53:46 Ben Gilbert That Nvidia gets by owning not only the driver stack, but, you know, all of CUDA and how tightly coupled their hardware and software is.
- ▶ 1:54:03 David Rosenthal CUDA and NVIDIA and general purpose computing on GPUs is a platform, so whatever, you know, all of the stew of powers that go into making that, that go into making Apple, Microsoft, you know, and the like,
- ▶ 2:08:00 David Rosenthal It's like, hey, we're building this CUDA thing.
Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:15:43 Ben Gilbert Nvidia's approach was to what graphics cards had been before, and building programmable shaders, and creating CG, which was a little bit of an early strategy and something they would later do with CUDA, but really understanding that like,…
- ▶ 1:37:23 David Rosenthal I mean, they made CG in collaboration with Microsoft, and CG works on NVIDIA products, but it's not like CUDA today to flash forward to next time.
- ▶ 1:56:16 Ben Gilbert Then the three D chess version is, and this kind of foreshadows the next episode because Nvidia had to learn these hard lessons and had to develop, like was forced to develop these really crazy competencies, like eventually developing CUDA.