Nvidia Unveils CuLitho: A “Breakthrough in Computational Lithography”

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/nvidia-unveils-culitho-breakthrough-in-computational-lithography/

by oumua_don17 • 3 years ago

158 126 3 years ago

allaboutcircuits.com

copperx4• 3 years ago

I'd bet my house over a donut that a Spanish-speaking employee at Nvidia came up with that name.

As my friend put it: "hmm, CuLitho de envidia."

Insanity• 3 years ago

My immediate thought was that they should have run this past any Spanish speaker in the company lol

kraussvonespy2• 3 years ago

culitho may have been the only remaining trademark-able word left in the English language.

mchaver• 3 years ago

I guess they all agreed it was a great name. Nvidia: my cuLitho brings all the boys to the lab and they're like it operates at the limits of Physics!

WJW3• 3 years ago

Maybe they did and all involved thought it was hilarious.

stormfather• 3 years ago

I'm a Spanish speaker and it doesn't sound funny to me. Slight differences in your native language are very distinctive, so I don't read "Culito" when I see it. Do you think Apple computers is too close to Asshole?

loloquwowndueo• 3 years ago

I bet you also didn’t see the hilariousness of “webOS” :)

estebarb2• 3 years ago

Everybody is different, but the 33800 laugh reaction in the Facebook post https://m.facebook.com/NVIDIADataCenter/photos/a.33432954734... (versus just 811 likes, 180 love, 115 surprise, 104 care and 14 sad reactions) suggests that most Spanish speakers read without the H.

jaxr• 3 years ago

Curious to know which Spanish "blend" you are most accustomed to... For me it was like instant ROFL.

carlmr2• 3 years ago

I'm a non-native intermediate Spanish speaker and it was my first thought. However I think it's cute and it makes people talk about it, so it's not a bad name.

AUDI étron is worse.

favsq2• 3 years ago

How exactly do you have to pronounce Apple to make it sound like asshole?

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Cuda was first

cubefox• 3 years ago

Oh. I was not aware that Nvidia means envy... (Because people would envy your for the amazing 3D graphics?)

jjoonathan• 3 years ago

Yeah, but I heard that it started with ".nv" suffixes on firmware files or something (for "next version") and the idea of pronouncing it / branding around "envy" came up later when they were searching for a brand. In any case, I think it fits their company personality well.

userbinator• 3 years ago

That's the theme the company had since the beginning, and it's also used in its green eye logo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidia

https://wccftech.com/nvidias-name-origins-history-roman-myth...

rbanffy• 3 years ago

I always remember HP started their Envy laptop line with an almost identical MacBook clone (in silver plastic, because HP).

tehsauce• 3 years ago

I tried to search for CuLitho on youtube on got quite surprising results

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Cthulu might be the inspiration. Lithography + Cthulhu -> Culitho? Dark Elder Gods of computation, certainly a big gaming influence.

carom• 3 years ago

Pretty sure it is just CUDA + Lithography.

px43• 3 years ago

Quick point of clarification here, Cthulhu wasn't an Elder God, it was an Old One. The Elder Gods were the ones who came and rescued humanity from the Old Ones, and locked Cthulhu in the sunken city of R'lyeh.

yosito2• 3 years ago

Came here to say this.

gonzus• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the pico editor -- pico means penis in some Spanish-speaking countries (it also means beak, FWTW). I remember contacting that project to let them know, I guess they thought it would be alright.

anthk7• 3 years ago

Most Spanish speakers will read "pico" as "peck". Also, it means a little kiss in the lips in Spain, among "heroine shoot".

Yes, Spanish can be that polysemic. As English does with let, get and set.

KeplerBoy• 3 years ago

At some point you have to acknowledge that you can't have it all.

People who think of dicks when reading pico instead of 1e-12 are probably not your target audience.

Al-Khwarizmi2• 3 years ago

I don't think it's comparable. Pico is highly polysemic. As you say, it also means beak, and it's also first person singular present of the verb "picar" (which is in turn polysemic, meaning to bite, or to have a snack, or to itch), and in Spain it can also be a small kiss, apart from being also a prefix in the metric system (the motivation for the editor's name) so it's not like most people would burst out laughing when hearing that word, as we are used to putting it in context and most meanings aren't about genitals. Just like some people have Dick as a surname and English-speaking people don't laugh, I guess.

Culitho is so unambiguous in Spanish, though, that it's hard not to laugh.

m463• 3 years ago

So I think culo means, well "posterior" and adding -ito is an endearing term that means small in an affectionate way. so "precious posterior". nvidia is like envidia which is envy in spanish.

yosito2• 3 years ago

Culito is basically Spanish for "nice ass" or "sweet ass". "Que culito!" would be "What a nice ass!" or "What a sweet ass!". "Que culito de envidia!" would be something like "What an enviable little ass!", although without the sense of it being physically "little", as in most cases an ass described as a "culito" is probably pretty thick. Oh, and adding the T, making it "culitho" doesn't technically affect the pronunciation, but it means you have to say it with more swagger.

Source: I lived in the Caribbean and spent way too much time watching reggaeton and dembow music videos.

favsq2• 3 years ago

Que no me entere que ese culitho pasa hambre.

pantulis• 3 years ago

SQLite que no pase hambre.

moffkalast• 3 years ago

For those that don't speak Spanish, this is GPT4's frog dissection:

The joke implies that a Spanish-speaking employee at Nvidia might have come up with the name "CuLitho" because it sounds similar to the Spanish phrase "culo de envidia," which means "butt of envy" or "an envious butt." The phrase is often used to describe someone who is envious or jealous of another person's success or possessions.

andy_ppp• 3 years ago

I feel ChatGPT "understands" the vast majority of things better than me, which is very worrying. It's only going to get better too.

ladyanita22• 3 years ago

I am spaniard, and I can tell you this is 100% accurate.

wslh• 3 years ago

Culito (NSFW) in Google Images: https://www.google.com.ar/search?client=safari&hl=en-ar&sxsr...

tianlong• 3 years ago

That reminds me the windows app Inkulator! Great name for all romance language speakers!

rowanG0772• 3 years ago

This seems to simply be an implementation of the algorithm on the GPU. I'm not saying it isn't worth doing that. But a breakthrough? I wouldn't call it that.

This won't allow faster chips. It's only a time saver.

xiphias2• 3 years ago

Parallizing all important algorithms are necessary. For you it’s just a time saver, for NVIDIA it’s business and one more thing to add to it’s computational quasi monopoly.

rowanG0772• 3 years ago

I didn't say it's not necessary. I didn't say it's not good business to do it. I even explicitly said it's worth doing which you have ignored for some reason.

I just disagree that this is a breakthrough.

brundolf• 3 years ago

Faster chips are only time savers

WJW3• 3 years ago

This will indeed allow faster chips, because reverse lithography used to be so slow that it was only used for the most critical parts of a chip. Now that it is more tractable, RL can be applied to many more parts of the chip. That will allow designers to better optimize the layout in those other parts, which leads to faster chips.

nemo44x• 3 years ago

Culitho means “ass” In Spanish.

29athrowaway13• 3 years ago

Technically, does not mean anything.

1) th is not used in Spanish

2) th would be likely hispanized as z

3) taken literally would sound culit-jo

If you ignore that you are left with "culito" which is ass + diminutive = small ass

estebarb2• 3 years ago

In Spanish the H is silent, except with the C consonant (like in chat, champagne...).

So, Th would be pronounced like just T. For example, thermo and now culitho.

copperx4• 3 years ago

I'm a native Spanish speaker and 2 and 3 are completely false. 1 is true, but when pronouncing foreign words with th, the sound is invariably converted to a T.

Thanos is "Tanos," Thermos is "termo," Ethernet is "Eternet," and so on.

andresgottlieb• 3 years ago

Could you please give an example of a word where th is hispanized as z?

atq2119• 3 years ago

Yes, but a cute one. It's the diminutive form.

highwaylights• 3 years ago

It's a good thing that all these new rapidly improving generative models we've built aren't able to do something as crazy like use the exact same hardware we're running them on to design better hardware for themselves.

nervously laughs in Schwarzenegger

RobotToaster• 3 years ago

Has anyone tested how good GPT is at verilog?

timschmidt• 3 years ago

Yes. It's surprisingly capable.

daqhris4• 3 years ago

Do you realize that now any human willing to expertiment with them is free to do. All it take is Internet access and an email address. Or a GPU-powered computer to ran them locally. My point is that we can not rightfully estimate who is using it or not. Some LLM models are publicly released after many private trials. Some people had access to GPT4 about 6 to 9 months before the official release. Not accounting primarily secretive institutions, like governments and corporations.

We just don't know what's out there and have no way to control, stop it or contain its spread. These models are powerful beyong imagination. Design computer chips is less tedious, for them, than assembling computer parts. They simulate human brain functions, not manual functions.

For my part, I stay on my best behaviour while interacting with them. One key reason being that not more than 10 years ago, a human named Snowden spoke out, with the help of independent journalists, about usage of an unusual piece of software aimed at recording all digital conversations transmitted over the Internet. We laughed him off because what he was describing was out of our realm of understanding.

This time around its commercialized AI agents. We don't know the full breath of their capabilities. We don't have a record of how many people are using them regularly and applying them to real life challenges. All that we are certain about is that their rate of improvement follows an exponential growth curve. Personally, I just assume that someone hungry enough, out there in the universe, is using them to tackle all kinds of puzzling problems.

mrelectric• 3 years ago

Is this sarcastic?

xbmcuser• 3 years ago

Yup this is one of the reasons why when I see people talk about how it can't do this or that I am shocked by the blinders people have. Specially people working in science fields. There are millions of very smart people with access to a lot of data that previously that they might not have been able to use but now they will be able to. I can't read the millions of science papers published over the years but the kinds of AI/language models that have started to crop up can. I predict a lot of different scientific fields not just medical will have sea change as more people start realising what kind of tool these language models are and how they can be used.

astrange• 3 years ago

All that we are certain about is that their rate of improvement follows an exponential growth curve.

Are we?

lazystar3• 3 years ago

hence why i never use capital letters in my comms - an ai will always use capitals.

vvrm• 3 years ago

Brought to you by the same creative minds that conceived CUDA (which means trash in Hindi).

exabrial• 3 years ago

Perhaps someone can explain to me, why aren't x-rays or another high frequency EMF used? Sure we can't bounce x-rays off mirrors like we can light (or can we?), but seems like a logical step we've never taken for some reason I'm ignorant to.

lcvw• 3 years ago

You need the mirrors to focus the light. X-rays have been tried and they had problems, such as requiring the use of gold to block the x-rays in the mask.

shrx• 3 years ago

You can focus X-rays, although I don't think nanometer resolution was achieved yet. For example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98888-8

vbezhenar• 3 years ago

Russia tries to create a lithography machine using X-rays. I'd take that with a grain of salt, but researches were done, so I guess it's possible, probably other approaches made more commercial sense at the time.

qwezxcrty• 3 years ago

EUV is already into soft X ray and behaves like X ray.

hoseja• 3 years ago

I wonder if there's some new quantum physics lurking somewhere deep in the fudge factors of the arcane cathedrals of chipmaking.

vletal• 3 years ago

Spanish speaking people getting offended by the name "cuLitho"? nVidia was like "sin penesar".

floatboth• 3 years ago

Mostly laughing rather than offended :D

peter_d_sherman• 3 years ago

Article:

"k1 = A constant that depends on many factors related to the chip manufacturing process"

Me: Then k1 is not really a constant, is it?

:-) <g> :-)

But on a serious note, all nitpicking aside, an interesting technology and excellent article!

Nvidia Unveils CuLitho: A “Breakthrough in Computational Lithography”

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