Video games are paving the road to the future of technology
Gamers' hunger for better graphics is driving up demand for better processors
Here's something interesting you might not know:
The graphics processors, or GPUs, that make possible the eye-poppingly realistic graphics of games like "Quantum Break" are also really well-suited to powering artificial intelligence and other high-intensity tasks.
The world of high-performance computing measures power in "FLOPS," or "floating point operations per second."
It turns out that as video game graphics have gotten better, the hardware used to produce them is increasingly well-suited to powering the AI future envisioned by companies like Google and Facebook.
"[After] 2007, all the big advances in FLOPS came from gaming video cards designed for high speed real time 3D rendering, and as an incredibly beneficial side effect, they also turn out to be crazily fast at machine learning tasks," wrote Stack Overflow founder Jeff Atwood in a March 2016 blog entry.
Nvidia and Google are actually partners on artificial intelligence, dating back to the Google Brain image recognition system, as detailed in an Nvidia blog entry. Long story short, Google Brain needed 2,000 CPUs, plus all of the server infrastructure to support them. That's a tall order. But they found that 12 Nvidia GPUs could deliver "the deep-learning performance of 2,000 CPUs."