Nvidia

GPU

Among others, Nvidia is a fabless company which designs GPUs and has become the dominant supplier of artificial intelligence hardware (and software).

CUDA

Besides designing GPUs, Nvidia also provides CUDA which is an API that help create massively parallel programs using GPUs.

TODO

nvidia-smi

nvidia-smi is a command line utility to manage and monitor Nvidia GPU chips (Tesla, Quadro, GRID and GeForce devices from the Fermi and higher architecture families.

The utility is based on the Nvidia Management Library (NVML).

In WSL, a copy of nvidia-smi is (sometimes?) found in /usr/lib/wsl/lib.

In Windows itself, a PE executable(?) is found under %SYSTEMROOT%\System32 (after installing the corresponding driver?)

nvcc

nvcc is Nvidia's LLVM-based C/C++ compiler.

nouveau

nouveau aims to build high-quality, free/libre software drivers for nVidia cards (apparently by reverse engineering the original nVidia drivers?)

Nouveau is composed of

a Linux kernel KMS driver (nouveau),
Gallium3D drivers in Mesa, and
the Xorg DDX (xf86-video-nouveau).

Nouveau tries to support all nVidia cards. However, it's deemed infeasible to document which cards and BIOSes actually work.

The feature matrix might give an idea on which features are supported on a given card family.