Happy 18th Birthday CUDA

&gt; Some people confuse CUDA, launched in 2006, for a programming language — or maybe an API. With over 150 CUDA-based libraries, SDKs, and profiling and optimization tools, it represents far more than that.<p>This is exactly the key point that all wannabe replacements forget, when offering only a C or C++ API, for what is the tip of an iceberg.<p>Intel and AMD never cared to offer anything besides a barebones OpenCL experience in C, until it was too late to catch up with a polyglot ecosystem (C, C++, Fortran, anything PTX), IDE integration, tooling and libraries.

Joined Nvidia in Oct 2008 and worked on this early CUDA stack. I worked on later stage compiler optimizations where both CUDA and gfx would merge into. CUDA was this “annoyance” we had to deal with. Lots of scenarios that would never show up with gfx code were suddenly possible when code generated by cuda toolchain was considered. Gfx made all the money yet CUDA was treated as first class citizen since the day it was born.