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Crazy that video game graphics business happened to be the secret level portal to AI land
by treme 3y ago
Crazy that video game graphics business happened to be the secret level portal to AI land
- falcor84 3y agoIn hindsight I think it makes good sense - game graphics were always aiming to represent worlds with as high fidelity as possible.
- barumrho 3y agoGood point, but it is interesting that the computations to render visual worlds in high fidelity is the same computation to "ingest" the data to create a model. Reminds me of how a mic is a speaker and speaker is a mic.
- AYBABTME 3y agoI think it speaks to the generalizability of linear algebra.
- p_l 3y agonVidia claims that they went into video games because it provided a way to fund their goal of compute accelerators
- amelius 3y agoThen why does my graphics card have 5 video outputs?
- packetlost 3y agoI don't believe that claim one bit. That reads like revisionist history if I've ever seen it. If there's sources that back it up, fine, but until I see pretty reasonable proof I'm going to take that as CEO grandstanding while the market is hot.
- Murfalo 3y agoWhat is so hard to believe? Technology evolves rapidly. I can't imagine that anyone investing big money in compute technology wouldn't have expected that.
- izacus 3y agoYou do understand nVidia dates back to fixed pipeline accelerators for essentially some vertices and textures, right?
- Zenul_Abidin 3y agoBecause that happened in a time when there were many players in the 90s each making their own GPUs for gaming purposes specifically. Compute was not even on the picture until things like CUDA and OpenCL came out.
- froonly 3y agoBack in the late 90s, there was a project at SGI, called Bali, to make all their pipelines work in IEEE 32-bit floating point (they were using Intel i860 chips) so that they could do HW rendering of scenes written in Pixar's Renderman language. Sony copied that idea for the 1st Playstation, and then folks like NVidia & 3DLabs quickly followed suit, the idea being they would enable that functionality for games like Final Fantasy. In the early 2000s, the HPC folks realized that you could use a GPU for physics & engineering codes, and here were are 20 yrs later.
- dotnet00 3y agoYou can find slides from IIRC one of their first GPUs talking about how they can be made into very capable compute accelerators. They've supported CUDA on most of their GPUs since 2007 while the competition is still struggling to put out a truly equivalent solution. Even before that they had Cg. I think it's pretty obvious that they saw the writing on the wall about the value of GPUs for massively parallel computing and actively pushed to be in the right spot for when everything took off.
- tgtweak 3y agoHighly doubt this was the initial idea for nvidia given they were graphics-only for a very long time. CUDA definitely felt like more of a value-add for the first 5-6 years than a concerted effort to build accelerators and to fund that with graphics demand. First "tesla" line of GPUs - which had very little compute-only focus - were in 2007.
- ksec 3y ago>First "tesla" line of GPUs - which had very little compute-only focus - were in 2007. CUDA was first released in ~2006 but started at least in 2004, largely building on top or the momentum of Cg which was released in 2002 and being worked on since 2000. There was at the time in the late 90s about general purpose parallel programming and how it could possible be done on GPUs or doing it on something like PS2 Cell. I dont know if Nvidia was really started with CUDA in mind in 1993. But Nvidia was into CUDA like GPU usage WAY ahead of anyone else in the field.
- cma 3y agoCell was PS3 (2006)
- gosub100 3y agoWasn't there a time when people were hacking shaders to do compute tasks and read the results back instead of displaying to the frame buffer?
- p_l 3y agoYes, multiple such attempts, including complete languages. Very thin hardware support as different GPUs varied very much on what could be done. GeForce 8 introduced CUDA because graphics pipeline similarly evolved into position where instead of forcing the use of dedicated cores for specific tasks (vector and fragment shaders) due to simple economies of chip making, the Shader Model 4 introducing yet another stage justified making unified shader cores... which could be just as easily used for other tasks.
- pxtail 3y agoOf course, obviously ever since inception of the company they had the noble goal of uplifting human race. It was just the set of unfortunate circumstances that forced them to make trivial utility devices just to survive long enough
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cma 3y agoThey did a lot on medical scan visualization pretty early on too.
- ripe 3y ago"When we were selling shovels to coal miners, we always secretly knew there was gold in those hills." Yeah, sure.
- m3kw9 3y agoAnd tell me what is Nvidia trying to fund with the AI business?
- baq 3y agoDoes a series of matrix multiplications have a soul?
- bheadmaster 3y agoDefine "soul".
- sirsinsalot 3y agoDoes a series of electrical impulses in a brain?
- amelius 3y agoObviously no, because signals take time to move from A to B, while humans live in the now.
- AYBABTME 3y agoMatrix multiplication is just an effective representation for the dense graph structures. The same graphs could be implemented in other ways (adjacency list, edge list), perform the same overall logic, without doing vector/matrix/tensor math. It seems like the magic is in the overall idea of neurons and networks of them following increasingly interesting architectures and training mechanisms. But because these graphs are mostly dense and involve numerical operations, matrices/tensors are a great implementation.
- VladimirGolovin 3y agoDoes a bunch of atoms arranged into proteins have a soul?
- paulmd 3y agodoes a SQL table provide a stochastic representation of conceptual symbolics? oh, sorry, I thought we were just asking questions
- MangoCoffee 3y agoNah, Intel said Nvidia just got "lucky"
- xyzzy_plugh 3y agoSo says every loser when they are bested by their own ignorance.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 3y agoEver since GPUs became programable, which goes earlier than many think (see TMS34010 from 1986), there has been many attempts to use the cards for general purpose compute. It turns out that anything related to neural networks, and similar AI approaches, is all about compute.
- dragontamer 3y agoI'd say almost the opposite in practice. GPUs, as they became programmable (and maybe even a little bit before that...), started to take cues from SIMD Supercomputers. So the compute methodologies were researched first, and then GPUs (ie: applications to graphics) were applied afterwards. I've heard rumors that the first programmable GPUs were considered because GPUs already were in SIMD-style compute and running instructions in a programmable way at the hardware/firmware level. It just needed to be "revealed" to OpenGL or DirectX programmers.
- pjmlp 3y agoTMS34010 used a C like SDK, in 1986, there were hardly any SIMD supercomputers, unless you consider Cray and Connection Machines as model.
- dragontamer 3y agoI'm thinking closer to 90s period, where "graphics cards" developed by Voodoo / 3dfx and its Glide API were clearly along the DirectX / OpenGL inspiration path. (3d Graphics pipeline / transform & lightning / etc. etc.). I don't know the exact point when these 3d accelerators became programmable with vertex/pixel shaders, but Glide is clearly on the path and part of the history here. -------- You're right in that 80s / Arcade chips look to be different. Its a programmable graphics chip alright, but I wouldn't call that chip SIMD, not from what I can see from Wikipedia at least.
- pjmlp 3y agoI wasn't the one bringing SIMD into the picture. :)
- dragontamer 3y agoWatch this 90s commercial for 3dfx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooLO2xeyJZA GPUs always had more compute / Gigaflops than traditional computers. GPUs in fact have more to do with 80s-era supercomputer architecture than normal CPUs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODIqbTGNee4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODIqbTGNee4