A conversation with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO Nvidia

Last night, Charlie Rose of PBS interviewed Nvidia’s CEO “Jensen”.  I caught this interview and made extensive notes as I could not get to my recorder.  Fortunately, you can catch the interview on Charlie Rose’ own website:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10060

Here are a few of my notes highlighting this interview.  Jensen, as he is called by his friends and employees, stated that about 20-30% of Nvidia’s business is to hard core gamers.  Nvidia likes to to think of themselves as  “hard core”, like Nike , for cyber-athletes.

It is a rather personal interview where Charlie Rose did his tech homework very well.  Jensen, now age 45, details how he grew up in the USA  and was sent to Baptist school in Kentucky with his brother as the only two Chinese kids in that school.  It was difficult he says, and it prepared him for later life and gave him some toughness for his Nvidia start-up, 15 years ago.  What saved him was his math skills, he said, and he became popular with his classmates by helping them with their homework.  He says he cleaned bathrooms in that school.  Later he went back to Washington state where he continued his education, specializing in math and science.  Jensen highlighted the fact that early exposure to a computer mainframe while still in school confirmed that he would be an engineer.  He also said they played StarTrek on the mainframe against other schools that had access and he speculated he might have played against Bill Gates.

One of the most interesting statements that Jensen made, were that all start-ups have an intuition. This is something we can relate to at ABT.  He actually looked into a potential future and realized that if these new graphics processors he was going to design were made in high volume, they would become as popular as video or audio of the day.  Jensen is definitely visionary as they considered “sharable  interactive” – what they had experienced on the mainframe in school – would be widespread on the Internet now.  Jensen actually imagined the online experience of today almost 20 years ago!  And they feel they have stayed true to their vision even if they “felt” their way there, occasionally, and ran into roadblocks when they mistimed something.

Of course, Charlie Rose asked about the competiton with Intel and Jensen admitted, “there is a tension between us and Intel”.  He believes, as the importance of the Graphics Processing Unit increases, it will be at least as important as the CPU which it is not attempting to supplant.  Jensen actually said the core of the “tension” between Nvidia and Intel “is the battle for the soul of the PC”.

Of course, this interview is over 30 minutes long and Jensen details the changing purpose of the PC.  Originally, it was created as an electronic extension of the typewriter plus a calculator  – Word and Excel were the “killer applications” that were based on the CPU’s strengths of text and number crunching.  Yet Jensen says the computer has much more – the ability to allow us to go to virtual worlds which can be more wonderful and imaginative than the real world as the PC becomes a medium for artistic expression along the way.  Of course this new Virtual Reality was made possible by Nvidia’s GPU.  So today the “tension” lies in the competition between CPU and GPU, as to what is more important.  Clearly Nvidia believes that the GPU is becoming more important, so much so that Intel is entering Nvidia’s territory with their new Larrabee processor.  Jensen next detailed that his favorite processor is Intel’s Atom – small and light.   He says anything that can be done on a massive desktop PC today can also be done on a mobile processor like Atom with a good GPU in the near-future.

Jensen believes shifting to “cloud computing” is actually a supplement to client computing.  TV did not destroy radio and the GPU will never take over the job of the CPU, so why should Nvidia reinvent it?  He simply feels that the computer needs both CPU and GPU to reach the full potential of Nvidia computing as they drive the industry forward as their top priority.   He pointed out that Nvidia is investing more into research and development in this recession now than they did last year!!  He insists the work that Nvidia is doing is too important to slow down as they are moving aggressively into realtime medical imaging, mobile computing, TV broadcasting and other areas beyond gaming.

As to the most exciting thing in Nvidia’s world, Jensen believes that the GPU has now become general purpose for number crunching which can increase computing power by a factor of 10 to 100+. This means when something becomes 100 times faster,  software egineers have to now think differently about how they program for the PC.  Jensen gave an example of one of the fastest computers in Japan that simply installed Nvidia GPUs to became much faster and is now ranked number 29 in the world.

Jensen further detailed Nvidia’s 3-D vision and its likely future in gaming and in TV viewing. He also went into detail on CUDA technology which is an architecture of parallel computing – it is similar to x86 for the CPU.  CUDA is the name of their architecture that is used to interface with their GPUs.  He also described, how five years ago, Nvidia spent many months working with scientists at Stanford University to make their GPU more than just for gaming.  Now CUDA is taught in 50 universities.

As a lesson for everyone, Jensen explained that Nvidia’s stumbles and adversity were an “unexpected price of innovation”.  Evidently the biggest challenges to Nvidia came as a result of intuitive decisions  where some turned out much harder because “technology and innovation does not come out in linear ways”, he said.  The interview concluded with Jensen stating that Nvidia’s “holy grail” is to make a difference.  They want to create a technology that “surprises and delights you”.  He projects that your car windshield will be soon augmented with computer graphics to improve the driving experience.

This interview is well worth viewing in its entirety.  Here is the ABT Forum topic devoted to it:

http://alienbabeltech.com/abt/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=521

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-Mark Poppin

ABT editor