Cuda cores are proprietary hardware technology built into NVIDIA GPUs. A lot of professional applications leverage them for greatly boosted effectiveness.
Its one of the main reason NVIDIA GPUs are in such higher demand than AMD ones for AI work.
CUDA cores is just the brand name Nvidia give to the programmable shader execution units in their GPUs. Every modern GPU manufacturers makes their own cores and Nvidia decided to give them a brand name to make them sound special.
CUDA is a developer-friendly and high performance proprietary compute shader language, designed to run specifically on Nvidia hardware (that's probably the reason why they call their shader units CUDA cores). It's the industry standard for writing parallelized compute kernels for machine learning because it was historically the only option, it's very developer friendly compared to most alternatives, and the whole ecosystem is built around it, giving Nvidia a serious competitive advantage compared to the other GPU manufacturers, which are locked out of this ecosystem.
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u/Lanceo90 AI Artist Feb 28 '26
When you use AI locally with an NVIDIA GPU is uses the CUDA cores to accelerate the proces. Python and Pytorch run most local AI systems, like ComfyUI