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Nvidia Unveils CuLitho: A “Breakthrough in Computational Lithography”
- copperx 4y agoI'd bet my house over a donut that a Spanish-speaking employee at Nvidia came up with that name. As my friend put it: "hmm, CuLitho de envidia."
- canadianfella 4y ago[dead]
- Insanity 4y agoMy immediate thought was that they should have run this past any Spanish speaker in the company lol
- kraussvonespy 4y agoculitho may have been the only remaining trademark-able word left in the English language.
- EntrePrescott 4y agoWas culitho ever a "word in the English language"? Anyways, if it's just about finding a trademark-able sequence of letters that can be done with the restricted latin alphabet used in the English language and keyboard, then there would still be the option of doing what nVidia did in their company name and add an n in front of another consonant, for example: nCuLitho … I wonder how Spanish-speaking people would like that one. Or maybe that added letter makes it too long anyways and it could be shortened to… nCuLo
- kraussvonespy 4y agoAgreed. culitho wasn't an English word until nVidia marketing extruded it into the world. In my defense, I was trying to vaguely reference the Problem with Popplers episode of Futurama but failed.
- mchaver 4y agoI guess they all agreed it was a great name. Nvidia: my cuLitho brings all the boys to the lab and they're like it operates at the limits of Physics!
- akiselev 4y agoMy culitho brings all the boys to the lab, And they're like, it's better than a silicon fab, We're laughing our way to the top, With computational power that won't stop! We'll be etching those chips to the groove, Culitho de NVIDIA, making that smooth move!
- pezezin 4y agoSet it to a reguetón tune, and you have a hit right here.
- WJW 4y agoMaybe they did and all involved thought it was hilarious.
- pezezin 4y agoI'm from Spain and knowing the average Spanish person, I can tell you that is exactly what would happen, followed by a "no hay huevos" (literally "no balls").
- stormfather 4y agoI'm a Spanish speaker and it doesn't sound funny to me. Slight differences in your native language are very distinctive, so I don't read "Culito" when I see it. Do you think Apple computers is too close to Asshole?
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoI bet you also didn’t see the hilariousness of “webOS” :)
- estebarb 4y agoEverybody is different, but the 33800 laugh reaction in the Facebook post https://m.facebook.com/NVIDIADataCenter/photos/a.334329547342715/1373322683443391/?type=3&mibextid=Nif5oz https://m.facebook.com/NVIDIADataCenter/photos/a.33432954734... (versus just 811 likes, 180 love, 115 surprise, 104 care and 14 sad reactions) suggests that most Spanish speakers read without the H.
- copperx 4y agoAnd it's eyebrow-raising even if you say it with the H.
- School-Cotton 4y agoYou can’t really say it with the “h”. Spanish has nothing corresponding to the English “h” sound, and the overwhelming majority of Spanish speakers speak dialects with nothing like the English “th” sound either (the ones that do have it spell it “c” or “z”, not “th”).
- anthk 4y agoWell, everyone under 30 knows basic English (for Spanish speakers) such as "thanks".
- jaxr 4y agoCurious to know which Spanish "blend" you are most accustomed to... For me it was like instant ROFL.
- m3kw9 4y agoCuda was first
- cubefox 4y agoOh. I was not aware that Nvidia means envy... (Because people would envy your for the amazing 3D graphics?)
- jjoonathan 4y agoYeah, but I heard that it started with ".nv" suffixes on firmware files or something (for "next version") and the idea of pronouncing it / branding around "envy" came up later when they were searching for a brand. In any case, I think it fits their company personality well.
- userbinator 4y agoThat's the theme the company had since the beginning, and it's also used in its green eye logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidia https://wccftech.com/nvidias-name-origins-history-roman-mythology/ https://wccftech.com/nvidias-name-origins-history-roman-myth...
- anthk 4y agoIn Spanish we have a saying which says "verde de envidia". Literally "enviously green", as being full of envy.
- rbanffy 4y agoI always remember HP started their Envy laptop line with an almost identical MacBook clone (in silver plastic, because HP).
- tehsauce 4y agoI tried to search for CuLitho on youtube on got quite surprising results
- photochemsyn 4y agoCthulu might be the inspiration. Lithography + Cthulhu -> Culitho? Dark Elder Gods of computation, certainly a big gaming influence.
- carom 4y agoPretty sure it is just CUDA + Lithography.
- px43 4y agoQuick point of clarification here, Cthulhu wasn't an Elder God, it was an Old One. The Elder Gods were the ones who came and rescued humanity from the Old Ones, and locked Cthulhu in the sunken city of R'lyeh.
- stavros 4y agoComments like this are why I come to HN.
- yosito 4y agoCame here to say this.
- gonzus 4y agoReminds me of the pico editor -- pico means penis in some Spanish-speaking countries (it also means beak, FWTW). I remember contacting that project to let them know, I guess they thought it would be alright.
- anthk 4y agoMost Spanish speakers will read "pico" as "peck". Also, it means a little kiss in the lips in Spain, among "heroine shoot". Yes, Spanish can be that polysemic. As English does with let, get and set.
- carlmr 4y agoPeck and pecker in English.
- KeplerBoy 4y agoAt some point you have to acknowledge that you can't have it all. People who think of dicks when reading pico instead of 1e-12 are probably not your target audience.
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y agoI don't think it's comparable. Pico is highly polysemic. As you say, it also means beak, and it's also first person singular present of the verb "picar" (which is in turn polysemic, meaning to bite, or to have a snack, or to itch), and in Spain it can also be a small kiss, apart from being also a prefix in the metric system (the motivation for the editor's name) so it's not like most people would burst out laughing when hearing that word, as we are used to putting it in context and most meanings aren't about genitals. Just like some people have Dick as a surname and English-speaking people don't laugh, I guess. Culitho is so unambiguous in Spanish, though, that it's hard not to laugh.
- m463 4y agoSo I think culo means, well "posterior" and adding -ito is an endearing term that means small in an affectionate way. so "precious posterior". nvidia is like envidia which is envy in spanish.
- yosito 4y agoCulito is basically Spanish for "nice ass" or "sweet ass". "Que culito!" would be "What a nice ass!" or "What a sweet ass!". "Que culito de envidia!" would be something like "What an enviable little ass!", although without the sense of it being physically "little", as in most cases an ass described as a "culito" is probably pretty thick. Oh, and adding the T, making it "culitho" doesn't technically affect the pronunciation, but it means you have to say it with more swagger. Source: I lived in the Caribbean and spent way too much time watching reggaeton and dembow music videos.
- favsq 4y agoQue no me entere que ese culitho pasa hambre.
- moffkalast 4y agoFor those that don't speak Spanish, this is GPT4's frog dissection: > The joke implies that a Spanish-speaking employee at Nvidia might have come up with the name "CuLitho" because it sounds similar to the Spanish phrase "culo de envidia," which means "butt of envy" or "an envious butt." The phrase is often used to describe someone who is envious or jealous of another person's success or possessions.
- andy_ppp 4y agoI feel ChatGPT "understands" the vast majority of things better than me, which is very worrying. It's only going to get better too.
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y agoWhile it's true that ChatGPT gives amazing explanations in many context, this one is not particularly good. The point is not that CuLitho is similar to "culo" (ass), as the similarity is not that obvious. The point is that it's practically identical to "culito" (little ass, where "little" is typically not literally about size, but more of an endearing term - another translation could be cute ass). The similarity is large enough that, at least in places where we use that term (not sure if it's used in the whole Spanish-speaking world, but e.g. in Spain it is) there's no way to read that name with a straight face.
- stavros 4y agoSure, but what does "culito de envidia" mean, other than "little butt of envy"?
- sdardo 4y agoThat's not how languages work. ChatGPT was wrong about it.
- rkagerer 4y agoThanks for clearing this up. Great example of how drinking from the fountain of machine generated content is a watered down experience. I'm less interested in an AI trained on the droves of mediocre crap out there on the web, but would be super excited if there were one trained on curated material consisting of carefully crafted and authoritative answers like this. Or at least a way to lend greater weight to such inputs.
- wslh 4y agoCulito (NSFW) in Google Images: https://www.google.com.ar/search?client=safari&hl=en-ar&sxsrf=APwXEdccPxLJv4fUCvvWjEX6lAtglUVwEg:1679915329331&q=culito&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHkdSj_Pv9AhVnppUCHbt7CecQ0pQJegQIBhAB&biw=430&bih=737&dpr=3 https://www.google.com.ar/search?client=safari&hl=en-ar&sxsr...
- tianlong 4y agoThat reminds me the windows app Inkulator! Great name for all romance language speakers!
- rowanG077 4y agoThis seems to simply be an implementation of the algorithm on the GPU. I'm not saying it isn't worth doing that. But a breakthrough? I wouldn't call it that. This won't allow faster chips. It's only a time saver.
- xiphias2 4y agoParallizing all important algorithms are necessary. For you it’s just a time saver, for NVIDIA it’s business and one more thing to add to it’s computational quasi monopoly.
- rowanG077 4y agoI didn't say it's not necessary. I didn't say it's not good business to do it. I even explicitly said it's worth doing which you have ignored for some reason. I just disagree that this is a breakthrough.
- brundolf 4y agoFaster chips are only time savers
- WJW 4y agoThis will indeed allow faster chips, because reverse lithography used to be so slow that it was only used for the most critical parts of a chip. Now that it is more tractable, RL can be applied to many more parts of the chip. That will allow designers to better optimize the layout in those other parts, which leads to faster chips.
- nemo44x 4y agoCulitho means “ass” In Spanish.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoTechnically, does not mean anything. 1) th is not used in Spanish 2) th would be likely hispanized as z 3) taken literally would sound culit-jo If you ignore that you are left with "culito" which is ass + diminutive = small ass
- estebarb 4y agoIn Spanish the H is silent, except with the C consonant (like in chat, champagne...). So, Th would be pronounced like just T. For example, thermo and now culitho.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoThermo is a loan word that people hispanize as "termo" (the Spanish equivalent).
- longemen3000 4y agowell, thermo is from the greek word thérmē meaning heat. we use the termo- suffix for all things that involve heat (thermodynamics -> termodinámica, thermometer -> termómetro)
- jolmg 4y agoPrefix. Suffixes come at the end.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoI am aware of the etymology you refer to, but in this case I am referring to something different. The noun "termo" in Spanish is formally recognized by the RAE to refer to a vacuum insulated food jar (such as the ones sold by Thermos®), and that is the word I was referring to, as it is the most widely identifiable use of the word "termo" in Spanish. https://dle.rae.es/termo https://dle.rae.es/termo i.e.: "Pasame ese termo por favor?", "Se me ha quedado el termo en mi casa".
- highwaylights 4y agoIt's a good thing that all these new rapidly improving generative models we've built aren't able to do something as crazy like use the exact same hardware we're running them on to design better hardware for themselves. nervously laughs in Schwarzenegger
- RobotToaster 4y agoHas anyone tested how good GPT is at verilog?
- timschmidt 4y agoYes. It's surprisingly capable.
- mbajkowski 4y agoAlso surprisingly capable at generating sample timing libs for arbitrary circuit topologies and calculating min and max delays after a little bit of guidance.
- daqhris 4y agoDo you realize that now any human willing to expertiment with them is free to do. All it take is Internet access and an email address. Or a GPU-powered computer to ran them locally. My point is that we can not rightfully estimate who is using it or not. Some LLM models are publicly released after many private trials. Some people had access to GPT4 about 6 to 9 months before the official release. Not accounting primarily secretive institutions, like governments and corporations. We just don't know what's out there and have no way to control, stop it or contain its spread. These models are powerful beyong imagination. Design computer chips is less tedious, for them, than assembling computer parts. They simulate human brain functions, not manual functions. For my part, I stay on my best behaviour while interacting with them. One key reason being that not more than 10 years ago, a human named Snowden spoke out, with the help of independent journalists, about usage of an unusual piece of software aimed at recording all digital conversations transmitted over the Internet. We laughed him off because what he was describing was out of our realm of understanding. This time around its commercialized AI agents. We don't know the full breath of their capabilities. We don't have a record of how many people are using them regularly and applying them to real life challenges. All that we are certain about is that their rate of improvement follows an exponential growth curve. Personally, I just assume that someone hungry enough, out there in the universe, is using them to tackle all kinds of puzzling problems.
- vvrm 4y agoBrought to you by the same creative minds that conceived CUDA (which means trash in Hindi).
- exabrial 4y agoPerhaps someone can explain to me, why aren't x-rays or another high frequency EMF used? Sure we can't bounce x-rays off mirrors like we can light (or can we?), but seems like a logical step we've never taken for some reason I'm ignorant to.
- lcvw 4y agoYou need the mirrors to focus the light. X-rays have been tried and they had problems, such as requiring the use of gold to block the x-rays in the mask.
- shrx 4y agoYou can focus X-rays, although I don't think nanometer resolution was achieved yet. For example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98888-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98888-8
- vbezhenar 4y agoRussia tries to create a lithography machine using X-rays. I'd take that with a grain of salt, but researches were done, so I guess it's possible, probably other approaches made more commercial sense at the time.
- qwezxcrty 4y agoEUV is already into soft X ray and behaves like X ray.
- hoseja 4y agoI wonder if there's some new quantum physics lurking somewhere deep in the fudge factors of the arcane cathedrals of chipmaking.
- vletal 4y agoSpanish speaking people getting offended by the name "cuLitho"? nVidia was like "sin penesar".
- floatboth 4y agoMostly laughing rather than offended :D
- peter_d_sherman 4y agoArticle: >"k1 = A constant that depends on many factors related to the chip manufacturing process" Me: Then k1 is not really a constant, is it? ? :-) <g> :-) But on a serious note, all nitpicking aside, an interesting technology and excellent article!