CUDA delivered a 10x to 100x performance boost on legacy code for real. The hardware had been capable of doing this for at least a generations previously but i

CUDA delivered a 10x to 100x performance boost on legacy code for real. The hardware had been capable of doing this for at least a generations previously but it lacked a few operations to make it accessible and efficient. What I think made people miss it is no one wanted to refactor their code to run efficiently on GPUs. It wasn't that hard to do so in a lot of cases but it was work. And all this set the stage for deep learning. It was the opening act if you will...