Why did Jensen Huang fund CUDA in 2006, according to David Patterson?

David Patterson says NVIDIA's founder and CEO Jensen Huang liked the idea of people using cheap graphics chips for other computing, and in 2006 funded a proprietary C-like language, CUDA, to make the multithreaded GPU easier to program. Huang then courted scientific users such as Department of Energy labs and built domain-specific libraries so GPUs could break out of graphics.

• CUDA was C-like, but ordinary C programs could not simply be compiled and run on it.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Ryan Peterman (2026-11-04). Read the whole episode summary →

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