i got these Parents Are Human cards in the mailbox today. also had a long chat with my lease office agent Z. it dawned upon me that there are people who don't know what NVIDIA is. i realized i live in a very small bubble. and maybe i need to talk to more people from diverse backgrounds. i also realized i can't really explain a lot of the things i think i know because they're so ingrained in the culture and space, like oh a gpu is that thing NVIDIA sells to AI companies to train models. but how do you explain a GPU to someone who doesn't know what a GPU is in the first place? it does matrix multiplication? it performs computations really fast? it is used to run games really smooth? it seems like i don't know what a GPU is as well. in fact, i don't know how most things in the world works.
here's an attempt with Claude's help
A GPU does one simple math problem, and does that problem thousands of times at once
Your screen is made of dots. Each dot has a color. To show a picture, the computer has to figure out what color each dot should be.
A normal computer figures out one dot, then the next dot, then the next.
A GPU figures out thousands of dots at the same time.
a few examples
- LLMs: billions of matrix multiplication
- ray tracing: vector math (dot products)
- video encoding: discrete cosine transform
- bitcoin mining: hash functions (bitwise ops and adds)
more resources
- https://cs184.eecs.berkeley.edu/sp19/lecture/23/how-gpus-work
- https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2007-02_How-GPUs-Work/04085637.pdf
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Z4oGN89MU
- "you need a graphics card that can perform 36 trillion calculations a second to run Cyberpunk 2077"