CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model developed by NVIDIA for general computing on its own GPUs (graphics processing units). CUDA enables developers to speed up compute-intensive applications by harnessing the power of GPUs for the parallelizable part of the computation.
While there have been other proposed APIs for GPUs, such as OpenCL, and there are competitive GPUs from other companies, such as AMD, the combination of CUDA and NVIDIA GPUs dominates several application areas, including deep learning, and is a foundation for some of the fastest computers in the world.
Graphics cards are arguably as old as the PC—that is, if you consider the 1981 IBM Monochrome Display Adapter a graphics card. By 1988, you could get a 16-bit 2D VGA Wonder card from ATI (the company eventually acquired by AMD). By 1996, you could buy a 3D graphics accelerator from 3dfx so that you could run the first-person shooter game Quake at full speed.
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