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Nvidia has been peddling compute for decades. They've long been selling enterprise tier cards for industrial purposes that are ill-suited to games. In many ways

Nvidia has been peddling compute for decades. They've long been selling enterprise tier cards for industrial purposes that are ill-suited to games. In many ways CUDA has been their long running attempt to break out of gaming. I'm not surprised here. They invested and invested and invested and now everyone is playing catch up while they nearly corner the market. In industry circles we've been lamenting their dominance in this area for well over a decade. Google and Apple are the only companies I see that have a shot at disrupting their market but they tend to end up navel gazing instead of burning bridges. And Nvidia has bridges with everyone. It's absolutely an industrial geopolitics mastercraft scenario. We'll be studying them for a century. Everyone has long known that the secret to unlocking the next tier of performance is solving concurrency. Look at all the advances that have made it into production in the last twenty years. But threading models only get you so far on a CPU, and programming GPUs is comparatively very difficult. Nvidia has always aimed to displace the CPU's prominence, since day one. It's horizontal scaling 101.

bcrosby95 3y ago
Decades is still long after the first GeForce. Before CUDA we had third parties using graphics primitives to run general purposes computing. So I'm not buying it.
erupt7893 3y ago
They've been peddling compute since mid-2000's, however Nvidia has been around for much longer. To the revisionist history point, I'm unfamiliar seeing any of this prior to that. Unless I'm missing something, they were very much a graphics only company competing with 3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATi, etc
- dotnet00 3y ago
  They were founded in 1993, but until 1998 had only put out 2 chips, the first was a quadratic surface renderer that didn't sell well, and the second was a normal triangle rasterizer that saved them from bankruptcy. Then in 2001 they released the first GPU that could run code, each subsequent generation expanding on that capability until they were able to do general purpose compute with CUDA.
hibikir 3y ago
Nvidia was selling cards with hardware acceleration since 1997. The first one I own is from 1998, and its advantage wasn't that it had superior compute, but that it also included the non-3d circuitry of the rest of the video card. So instead of having a 2d card and a Voodoo, which were daisy chained, you could use that a lone Riva TNT that will do both. So they started being less about compute than the competition. Between the first nvidia cards and the first release of CUDA, you have a decade.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  > So instead of having a 2d card and a Voodoo, which were daisy chained, you could use that a lone Riva TNT that will do both Or get the slightly underpowered Banshee.

bcrosby95 3y ago

Decades is still long after the first GeForce. Before CUDA we had third parties using graphics primitives to run general purposes computing. So I'm not buying it.

erupt7893 3y ago

They've been peddling compute since mid-2000's, however Nvidia has been around for much longer. To the revisionist history point, I'm unfamiliar seeing any of this prior to that. Unless I'm missing something, they were very much a graphics only company competing with 3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATi, etc

dotnet00 3y ago
They were founded in 1993, but until 1998 had only put out 2 chips, the first was a quadratic surface renderer that didn't sell well, and the second was a normal triangle rasterizer that saved them from bankruptcy. Then in 2001 they released the first GPU that could run code, each subsequent generation expanding on that capability until they were able to do general purpose compute with CUDA.

hibikir 3y ago

Nvidia was selling cards with hardware acceleration since 1997. The first one I own is from 1998, and its advantage wasn't that it had superior compute, but that it also included the non-3d circuitry of the rest of the video card. So instead of having a 2d card and a Voodoo, which were daisy chained, you could use that a lone Riva TNT that will do both. So they started being less about compute than the competition. Between the first nvidia cards and the first release of CUDA, you have a decade.

dehrmann 3y ago
> So instead of having a 2d card and a Voodoo, which were daisy chained, you could use that a lone Riva TNT that will do both Or get the slightly underpowered Banshee.