4 ms·

A strong argument can be made that Nvidia helped these technologies gain traction.

by EduardoBautista 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago
In the early 2000s it was a common theme in the CS literature that the Von Newman architecture was about to run out of steam and some kind of parallel processor was going to become mainstream, out of all that work the GPGPU became the most famous. If NVIDIA hadn’t done it, someone else would have.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Heh, I remember that too. Von Neumann architectures being legacy was all the rage, and many students were excited to be able to build the next thing.
- joe_the_user 3y ago
  Indeed, The thing is, Nvidia has "done it" and still no one else is "doing it". As the gp points out, Nvidia launched CUDA a while and this made Nvidia's products general purpose parallel processors. They have succeeded as that and yet still no one is selling chips that either have an equivalent interface or (better) are drop-in Cuda compatible (since we know interfaces and programming language copyrightable). The situation seems a bit like early PC days when companies sold (roughly) PC compatible computers were appropriately shoved aside by drop-in compatible clones/white-boxes. A company that makes a thing "kinda like" the leader but with it's own sauce is just trying to carve a piece of an existing market. The company that makes something exactly compatible with the leader has an incentive to go further. I hate to say "embrace and extend" but there you have it.
josu 3y ago
Not crypto. Bitcoin had a very short GPU phase that spanned for a few months, before moving to FPGAs and finally to ASICs. Ethereum made a concerted effort to sabotage ASIC mining, and remain GPU minable. Such is the case for all other GPU minable coins. So no, I don't think crypto needed GPUs. Related to that, I feel like AI should start moving to FGPAs/ASICs soon.

4 ms·

A strong argument can be made that Nvidia helped these technologies gain traction.

by EduardoBautista 3y ago

A strong argument can be made that Nvidia helped these technologies gain traction.

PaulHoule 3y ago
In the early 2000s it was a common theme in the CS literature that the Von Newman architecture was about to run out of steam and some kind of parallel processor was going to become mainstream, out of all that work the GPGPU became the most famous. If NVIDIA hadn’t done it, someone else would have.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Heh, I remember that too. Von Neumann architectures being legacy was all the rage, and many students were excited to be able to build the next thing.
- joe_the_user 3y ago
  Indeed, The thing is, Nvidia has "done it" and still no one else is "doing it". As the gp points out, Nvidia launched CUDA a while and this made Nvidia's products general purpose parallel processors. They have succeeded as that and yet still no one is selling chips that either have an equivalent interface or (better) are drop-in Cuda compatible (since we know interfaces and programming language copyrightable). The situation seems a bit like early PC days when companies sold (roughly) PC compatible computers were appropriately shoved aside by drop-in compatible clones/white-boxes. A company that makes a thing "kinda like" the leader but with it's own sauce is just trying to carve a piece of an existing market. The company that makes something exactly compatible with the leader has an incentive to go further. I hate to say "embrace and extend" but there you have it.
josu 3y ago
Not crypto. Bitcoin had a very short GPU phase that spanned for a few months, before moving to FPGAs and finally to ASICs. Ethereum made a concerted effort to sabotage ASIC mining, and remain GPU minable. Such is the case for all other GPU minable coins. So no, I don't think crypto needed GPUs. Related to that, I feel like AI should start moving to FGPAs/ASICs soon.