Ask HN: What Is Envidia?

by NarcisMirandes on 8/30/2024, 2:50:07 PM with 3 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?

  • by PaulHoule on 8/30/2024, 2:56:12 PM

    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.

  • by solardev on 8/30/2024, 6:36:46 PM

    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)