facebook to use nvidia exclusively

[ondooy]

http://www.fool.com/investing/gener...nc-gives-nvidia-corporations-gpus-a-seal.aspx

Facebook is using Nvidia's new Tesla M40 GPUs in Big Sur, a computing platform designed for AI and machine learning tasks. Nvidia says that it worked with Facebook to ensure that Big Sur will deliver "maximum performance for machine learning workloads, including the training of large neural networks across multiple Tesla GPUs."

This decision highlights an interesting market opportunity for Nvidia, the largest manufacturer of add-in graphics boards in the world. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of GPUs in machine learning tasks when compared to traditional CPUs. Will Facebook's vote of confidence in Nvidia's GPUs attract the attention of other players in the machine learning market?

Nvidia also makes it easier for developers to create deep learning apps with CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), its own parallel computing platform and API model. CUDA works with common programming languages like C++, and gives developers direct access to the GPU. AMD, Nvidia's main rival in high-end GPUs, uses OpenCL (Open Computing Language), which lacks CUDA's deep learning libraries.