Programmers will finally be able to harness the full computing power of Nvidia's latest GPUs, code-named Hopper, with new software tools released by the company on Monday. Nvidia is now shipping its CUDA 12 programming tools, which are the driving force behind the company's future in artificial intelligence and graphics. "CUDA in some ways is an interface to the GPU. But it is an interface which is a programming model, a whole set of tools, and a large array of libraries," said Stephen Jones, CUDA architect at Nvidia, in an exclusive interview with The New Stack. CUDA provides the core foundation of communicating with the GPU.

GPU maker Nvidia will soon release the next version of the CUDA parallel-programming framework, version 12, to accompany the release of its new GPU architecture code-named Hopper. "It's the biggest release we've ever done," said Stephen Jones, CUDA architect at Nvidia, during a break-out session held at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference being held virtually earlier this month. CUDA started off as a simple programming language in June 2007 targeted at graphics, and is currently in version 11.7, with one major update, version 11.8, due before the move to version 12. Jones didn't provide an exact shipment date for CUDA 12, but past release timeline points to a version 12 available for download either late this year or early next year. Nvidia typically releases a new version of CUDA with every new GPU architecture. This is the first time in two years that CUDA users will experience a major version change.