The graphic guys calls them Shaders, a few years ago we called them pipelines and now Nvidia starts calling them cores.
Pipeline was not programmable and it was quite primitive
compared to a Shader, but at the end you put a pixel or any kind of data in Shader
or pipeline and after a lot of mathematics you get your final score. That is
what graphic and computing are all about.
The future of Nvidia's approach involves more cores / Shaders
and at the same time, SLI as a way to put even more of these cores to work
together.
SLI or putting two cards with multiple cores to work
together is tougher approach but it is something that Nvidia works on for years
and it will continue to make it better.
This is one of the key messages that we brought from our
very productive meetings that we had with Nvidia managers in their Headquarters
in Santa Clara. This meeting was a milestone as this was the first time Nvidia
let yours truly to walk in that building. It took me only nine years to get in.