NVIDIA Announces CUDA Tile with CUDA 13.1

With its largest advancement since the NVIDIA CUDA platform was invented in 2006, CUDA 13.1 is launching NVIDIA CUDA Tile. This exciting innovation introduces a virtual instruction set for tile-based parallel programming, focusing on the ability to write algorithms at a higher level and abstract away the details of specialized hardware, such as tensor cores. CUDA exposes a single-instruction, multiple-thread (SIMT) hardware and programming model for developers. This requires (and enables) you to exhibit fine-grained control over how your code is executed with maximum flexibility and specificity. However, it can also require considerable effort to write code that performs well, especially across multiple GPU architectures.

There are many libraries to help developers extract performance, such as NVIDIA CUDA-X and NVIDIA CUTLASS. CUDA Tile introduces a new way to program GPUs at a higher level than SIMT. With the evolution of computational workloads, especially in AI, tensors have become a fundamental data type. NVIDIA has developed specialized hardware to operate on tensors, such as NVIDIA Tensor Cores (TC) and NVIDIA Tensor Memory Accelerators (TMA), which are now integral to every new GPU architecture. With more complex hardware, more software is needed to help harness these capabilities. CUDA Tile abstracts away tensor cores and their programming models so that code using CUDA Tile is compatible with current and future tensor core architectures.

Tile-based programming…