“Nvidia invented the GPU in 1999” wrong on many fronts.
Arguably the November 1996 launch of 3dfx kickstarted GPU interest and OpenGL.
After reading that, it’s hard to take author seriously on the rest of the claims.
Arguably the November 1996 launch of 3dfx kickstarted GPU interest and OpenGL.
After reading that, it’s hard to take author seriously on the rest of the claims.
“GeForce 256 was marketed as "the world's first 'GPU', or Graphics Processing Unit", a term Nvidia defined at the time as "a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second"”
They may have been the first with a product that fitted that definition to market.
I don't think you can get a speedup by running neural networks on the GeForce 256, and the features listed there aren't really relevant (or arguably even present) in today's GPUs. As I recall, people were trying to figure out how to use GPUs to get faster processing in their Beowulfs in the late 90s and early 21st century, but it wasn't until about 02005 that anyone could actually get a speedup. The PlayStation 3's "Cell" was a little more flexible.
The article is a very good historical one showing how 3 important things came together to make the current progress possible viz;
1) Geoffrey Hinton's back-propagation algorithm for deep neural networks
2) Nvidia's GPU hardware used via CUDA for AI/ML and
3) Fei-Fei Li's huge ImageNet database to train the algorithm on the hardware. This team actually used "Amazon Mechanical Turk"(AMT) to label the massive dataset of 14 million images.
Excerpts;
“Pre-ImageNet, people did not believe in data,” Li said in a September interview at the Computer History Museum. “Everyone was working on completely different paradigms in AI with a tiny bit of data.”
“That moment was pretty symbolic to the world of AI because three fundamental elements of modern AI converged for the first time,” Li said in a September interview at the Computer History Museum. “The first element was neural networks. The second element was big data, using ImageNet. And the third element was GPU computing.”
If you are going to count 3dfx as a proper GPU and not just a geometry and lighting accelerator, then you might as well go back further and count things like the SGI Reality Engine. Either way, 3dfx wasn't really first to anything meaningful.
According to Wikipedia, Nvidia released its first product, the RV1, in November 1995, the same month 3dfx released its first Voodoo Graphics 3D chip. Is there reason to think the 3dfx card was more of a "true" GPU than the RV1? If not, I'd say Nvidia has as good a claim to inventing the GPU as 3dfx does.
3dfx Voodoo cards were initially more successful, but I don’t think anything not actually used for deep learning should count.
I mean, I certainly don't think NVIDIA invented the GPU—that's a clear error in an otherwise pretty decent article—but it was a pretty gradual process.