Ask HN: What Is Envidia?

1 pointsNarcisMirandes1y ago3 comments

It seems like an innocent question, but it is not so clear if you think about it. Some will say it is a chip "designer," but Jensen Huang probably will not agree, and he will say it is much more than that.

With all the last changes, how would you define Nvidia?

3 comments

PaulHoule1y ago

Software is a big part of the NVIDIA story. That is, the drivers have a compiler that converts CUDA code to whatever instructions the silicon takes. Other tools like PyTorch are built on top of CUDA so I have a "just works" experience running most AI code on NVIDIA. I think AMD could handle these workloads at the silicon level but I'd have a lot of difficult software development in front of me to make it happen.

My understanding is that it is a similar story with games. The "game ready" drivers are insanely large because they contain all sorts of patches to improve performance and reliability for AAA games.

NarcisMirandesOP1y ago

If a 10 years old ask you: what is Envidia? What would you tell him/her?

solardev1y ago

Right place, right time.

They went from gaming GPU provider to an early risk-taker in CUDA, and that paid off handsomely both for crypto and AI.

I hope they don't abandon the gaming segment :( GeForce Now has been a game-changer for me (hosted RTX-4080s for gaming for $20/mo)

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