David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. Today, CUDA is, starting from the bottom and going up, a compiler, a runtime, a set of development tools like a debugger and a profiler. It is its own programming language, CUDA C++. It has industry-specific libraries. It works on every card that they ship and have shipped since 2006, which is a really important thing to know. If you’re a CUDA developer, your stuff works on everything. Anything Nvidia, all this unified interface. It has many layers of abstractions and existing libraries that are optimized. These libraries of code that you can call to keep your development work short and simple instead of reinventing the wheel. There are things that you can decide that you want to write in C++ and just rely on their compiler to make it run well on Nvidia hardware for you. Or you can write stuff in their native language and try to implement things yourself in CUDA C++. The answer is it’s incredibly flexible, it is very well-supported, and there’s this huge community of people that are developing with you and building stuff for you to build on top of. If you look at the number of CUDA developers over time, it was released in 2006. It took four years to get the first hundred thousand people. Then by 2016, 13 years in, they got to a million developers. Then just two years later, they got to two million. Thirteen years to add their first 13 million, then 2 years to add their second. 2022 they hit 3 million developers. Then just one year later in May of 2023, CUDA has 4 million registered developers. At this point, there’s a huge moat for Nvidia. I think when you talk to folks there, and frankly when we did talk to folks there, they don’t describe it this way. They don’t think about it like, well CUDA is our moat versus competitors. It’s more like, well look. We envisioned a world of accelerated computing in the future, and we thought there are way more workloads that should be parallelized and made more efficient, that we want people to run on our hardware, and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to do that. We’re going to go to great lengths and have 1000–2000 people that work at our company, that are going to be full-time software engineers building this programming language, compiler, foundation, framework and everything on top of it, to let the maximum number of people build on our stuff. That is how you build a developer ecosystem. It's a different language, but the bottom line is they have a huge reverence for the power that it gives them at the company. This is something we touched on in our last episode, but has really crystallized for me in doing this one. Nvidia thinks of themselves as, and I believe is, a platform company, especially this week after the blowout earnings, everything that happened this quarter, the stock and whatnot. A popular takeout there that you’ve been seeing a lot is, oh we’ve seen this movie before. This happened with Cisco. You could say over a longer timescale this happened with Intel. Yeah, these hardware providers, these semiconductor companies, they’re hot when they’re hot and people want to spend CapEx, and then when they’re not hot, they’re not hot. But I don’t think that’s quite the right way to characterize Nvidia. They do make semiconductors and they do make data center gear, but really they are a platform company. The right analogy for Nvidia also is Microsoft. They make the operating system, they make the programming environment, they make many of the applications. Right. Cisco doesn’t really have developers. Intel never had developers. Microsoft had developers and Intel had Microsoft, but Intel didn’t have developers. Nvidia has developers. They’ve built a new architecture that is not a von Neumann computer. They’ve bucked 50 years of progress, and instead every GPU has a stream processor unit. And as you’d imagine, you need a whole new type of programming language and compiler and everything to deal with this new computing model. That’s CUDA and it fricking works. There are all these people that develop their livelihood in it.…

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