CUDA
Technology & Computing abbreviation · Computer Hardware
| Stands for | Compute Unified Device Architecture |
|---|---|
| Categories | Technology & Computing |
CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, a computer hardware abbreviation.
Nvidia's parallel-computing platform and programming model that lets developers run general-purpose code on Nvidia GPUs. Most AI frameworks, including PyTorch and TensorFlow, rely on CUDA to accelerate training and inference.
Example: Install the CUDA toolkit before building PyTorch with GPU support.
Usage notes
Nvidia introduced CUDA in 2006 and released the first toolkit in 2007. Its large ecosystem of libraries, such as cuDNN and cuBLAS, is often described as Nvidia's competitive moat, because CUDA code does not run natively on AMD or Intel GPUs; AMD's ROCm and the cross-vendor SYCL standard are alternatives. Graphics cards also list "CUDA cores", Nvidia's name for its shader units.
Related abbreviations
More computer hardware abbreviations
- CF – CompactFlash
- CISC – Complex instruction set computer
- CL – CAS latency
- CMOS – Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor
- CMR – Conventional magnetic recording
- CPU – Central processing unit
- DAS – Direct-attached storage
- DDR – Double data rate
- DDR4 – Double Data Rate 4
- DDR5 – Double Data Rate 5
- dGPU – Discrete graphics processing unit
- DIMM – Dual inline memory module