this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

K, this is one of those "and now I'm afraid to ask" memes, but comnents like yours have me super confused. What's all the CUDA about?

I have 2 machines with AMD CPU/GPU hardware. SOC maybe? I really didn't pay much attention outside of wanting the extra CPU cores for... reasons. They're both Ryzen, one's a 5, 'tother a 7. The GPU component has always worked fantastically, but I don't stress it much as I'm not a gamer. The CPU component has been a dream for my many-threaded needs. And so I'm confused when people chip in about this news complaining about AMD. What, exactly, isn't working for people, and why don't I notice it?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

CUDA is Nvidia's conputation toolkit and language. it opens up to developers ways to accelerate tasks using the GPU. GPUs are usually really good at doing 2 things better than CPUs, Floating point math, and linear algebra (think a gpu to be like thousands of dumb smaller cores vs a couple of large cores with multiple instructions like the CPU.)

CUDAs main strength is that it makes programming a lot easier for devs, at the cost that its implementation is black box and proprietary. when you have devs use such a proprietary language, the it makes it significantly harder to jump ship if your work relies on it to make a profit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

So, CUDA is SIMD for (or backed by) GPUs?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Cuda is Nvidia's GPU programming toolkit. It has become the de facto standard for machine learning and AI work as well as various other workloads in which running the program on the graphics card is faster than doing so on the cpu.

Edit: There is more that it does, I am just giving a simplified explanation.