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And probably they'd been at least thinking about that since the early 2000s to have it ready by then. But the claim is that they were thinking about it since t
by Symmetry 3y ago
And probably they'd been at least thinking about that since the early 2000s to have it ready by then. But the claim is that they were thinking about it since their beginning in 1993, and that's the part that just seems hard to believe.
- dotnet00 3y agoThat's the claim Jensen has made, and while there isn't any particular evidence besides his word to go off for the founding goal, it's worth considering that between 1993 and 1998 they only put out 2 chips. The first one was quadratic primitive based (which, sounds more focused towards a future of compute applications, due to the ease of representing equations in such a form), and the second one was a last ditch effort triangle primitive chip to avoid bankruptcy after DirectX settled on triangle primitives. So I don't really think those years count for much in terms of determining what their goal was. Their release cadence only really picked up in 1998, and just 2-3 years later they had the first 'programmable' GPUs with early shaders. As such, saying that NVIDIA wasn't always aiming for GPU compute feels kinda like saying that SpaceX wasn't always aiming for feasibly reusable rocketry because it took them ~15 years to build up to their current version of it.
- agumonkey 3y agoAlso a funny 'existential' point to remember. You have a clean idea (doing math / quad-splines) but the market sinks it.. doesn't mean it won't be good later. It's a game of long and patient grind.