David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, in particular, it's interesting because I've heard Jensen reference it as a programming language. I've heard him reference it as a computing platform. It is all of these things. It's an API. It is an extension of C or C++ so there's a way that it's sort of a language, but importantly, it's got all these frameworks and libraries that live on top of it and it enables super high level application development, really high abstraction layered 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 at this point. This is what's so brilliant. Right after the same day that we released part one, the first NVIDIA episode we did a couple of weeks ago, Ben Thompson had this amazing interview with Jensen on Stratechery. Jensen, in this interview, I think puts what CUDA is and how important it is better than I've seen anywhere else. This is Jensen speaking to Ben. "We've been advancing CUDA and the ecosystem for 15 years and counting. We optimize across the full stack iterating between GPU, acceleration libraries, systems, and applications continuously all while expanding the reach of our platform by adding new application domains that we accelerate. We start with amazing chips, but for each field of science, industry, and application, we create a full stack. We have over 150 SDKs that serve industries from gaming and design, to life and earth sciences, quantum computing, AI, cybersecurity, 5G, and robotics." Then he talks about what it took to make this. This is the point we were trying to hammer home here. He says, "You have to internalize that this is a brand new programming model and everything that's associated with being a program processor company or a computing platform company has to be created. We had to create a compiler team. We had to think about SDKs. We had to think about libraries. We had to reach out to developers, evangelize our architecture, and help people realize the benefits of it. We even had to help them market this vision so that there would be demand for their software that they write on our platform, and on, and on, and on." It's crazy. It's amazing. When he says that it's a whole new programming that he says maybe paradigm or a way of programming, it is literally true because most programming languages up to this point and most computing platforms primarily contemplated serial execution of programs. What CUDA did was it said, you know what? The way that our GPUs work and the way that they're going to work going forward is tons and tons of cores all executing things at the same time parallel programming, parallel architecture. Today, there's over 10,000 cores on their most recent consumer graphics card. Insanely or dare I say embarrassingly parallel, and CUDA is designed for parallel execution from the very beginning.…

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