All eyes will be on Nvidia’s (NVDA) annual GPU Technology Conference next week where it will unveil its next-generation artificial intelligence chip platform, Vera Rubin.
The highly-anticipated AI chip platform follows Nvidia’s practice of naming its GPU architectures after (mostly) women scientists.
Nvidia’s latest AI platform, Blackwell, was named after David Blackwell — the first Black American to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1965.
Here are the women scientists Nvidia has named its AI chips after.
Vera Rubin was an astronomer who contributed to research on dark matter. After observing more than 60 galaxies, Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford discovered evidence of dark matter in the universe.
In 1965, Rubin became the first woman scientist on staff at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C. She died in 2016.
Nvidia named its Hopper architecture after Grace Hopper, a U.S. naval officer who contributed to developments in automatic programming, coding languages, and other software. During World War II, Hopper worked on the Mark I general-purpose computer.
Hopper died in 1992.
The Ada GPU architecture, which was designed for gaming graphics and AI, was named after Ada Lovelace.
Lovelace was an 1800s mathematician who is considered “the first programmer” because she hypothesized that computers could be used for more than calculating numbers.
The U.S. Department of Defense named a computer language “Ada” after her in 1979.
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