Thank you. I got a little further this time. The UI needs a LOT of work to make it friendlier. It's difficult to enter numerical values, and often the values just go blank.
I suppose there's a reason node editors use a block and line interface mainly.
I'd actually prefer a tree-structured approach, where you could turn a subgraph into a single block, allowing you to structure appropriately.
I move blocks around. Some blocks I can attach to the bottom of "run this program" block and they clearly run. But I was unable to add any more blocks that did anything.
The screen is two dimensional so I was expecting to be able to put processing blocks anywhere. Sure I can but they do nothing.
What's missing (for me at least) is an explanation of the user interface.
The hardware transform and lighting was an enormous step forward, and there was no other single-chip manufacturer that had that functionality. Yes, it took a while before the game developers learned to use the hardware well. We supplied the cart; up to them to get the horse attached and working...
I'm not going to argue the meaning of "GPU" with the other posters. Suffice to say our intent was to implement the entire graphics pipeline in hardware, allowing a nearly complete offloading of the CPU.
We demonstrated the GeForce 256 to SGI engineers, and showed that we could run their OpenGl demos at roughly the same speed they ran on their Onyx systems which cost about 100 times as much.
The linked Nvidia article, to be honest, is marketing fluff. It took several years before we figured out how to turn a GPU into a usable parallel computation engine; in the meantime we had enough effective programmability that people hacked up D3D and OpenGl programs to do some interesting work.
I read in Forbes about a construction company that used AI-related tech to manage the logistics and planning. They claimed that they were saving upwards of 20% of their costs because everything was managed more accurately. (Maybe they had little control boxes on their workers too; I don't know.)
The point I am trying to make is that the benefits of AI-related tech is likely to be quite pervasive and we should be looking at what corporations are actually doing. Sort of what this poem says:
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking /
Seem here no painful inch to gain, /
Far back through creeks and inlets making, /
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
NVDA's forward PE is ~37, about what it has been for the past ~5 years I've been tracking that. So it's not overpriced based on that metric.
If you're convinced the stock is that overvalued, go short some or, if you like to live dangerously, buy some long-term put options (don't be an idiot and buy short-term options.)
I have no idea if NVDA is like Cisco Systems in 2000, or if it's something unique. What I am aware of is that there's around 5-7 trillion that were moved from stocks to t-bills since the Fed raised rates in March 2022. If and when they drop their rates back to the historical ~2.5%, it's reasonable to predict these funds will go back into stocks, which will presumably drive up prices.
The thing that is truly mindboggling to me is that THE SHADOWS IN THE IMAGES ARE CORRECT. How is that possible??? Does DALL-E actually have a shadow-tracing component?
The thing about owning the CUDA spec is that Nvidia can add new features quickly without having to argue with other hardware vendors. I find that a positive thing overall.
Also, I choose to pay the ~$120 Windows tax once (per box), everything works very well, and I don't have the driver issues that some fraction of other users seem to have with Linux and Nvidia cards. Seems like a good use of my time.
I suppose there's a reason node editors use a block and line interface mainly.
I'd actually prefer a tree-structured approach, where you could turn a subgraph into a single block, allowing you to structure appropriately.