Nvidia GPU Technology Conference, Final Day 3
Opening Keynote, Day 3 – Richard Kerris of Lucas Films
Richard Kerris showed his clips from the “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” as well as from current and even unreleased movies (that we cannot show you) which demonstrated how much progress has been made at Lucasfilm due to the increased power of GPUs. It has changed the very way they do production and has speeded it up greatly.
One of the most impressive and difficult effects is to render fire properly. Without the GPU, it would not be possible to do it in such detail and with such realism (or surrealistic “fantastic” effects). Here is what we meant when we said “Nvidia killed Dumbledore”; their GPUs made this fire rendering possible in “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.”
The entire scene in the fire/water cave except for the actors was purely CGI and incredibly complex. It is only made possible by the GPU. In fact, they pointed out that the parallel processing of GPUs actually mimics how our brains work. It is this programming that is responsible for the continually increasing quality of animation. To that end, Lucasfilm has begun to construct a custom GPU render farm to better harness the power of the GPU. In fact, they brought over fifty people to this conference.
The presentation ended with scenes from several movies including next year’s “The Last Airbender” from director M. Night Shyamalan that we were asked not to photograph. It was a very impressive demonstration of the current state of the art. Now, it’s off in just a couple of minutes to the Peddie/Jensen “Fireside chat”
ECS Summit – Peddie/Jensen
This “fireside chat” with Jon Peddie interviewing Jen-Hsun Huang (Jensen), was billed as “Jensen unplugged”- but I believe they really mean “unleashed”. Jensen likened himself to the Chris Rock of CEOs in that he “actually says what is on his mind”. This interview was billed as unscripted and it consisted mostly of Jensen responding to Peddie’s questions and taking what ever direction he wanted. At the very end, a couple of members of the audience got to ask Jensen questions.
In answer to a Peddie question, Jensen started out by talking about radically different corporate philosophies of different companies in a recessions. The “safe” way is to just stay alive but he says he never picks that way nor does he panic. He told the emerging companies to first ask if what they are attempting to do is even possible – if you can afford to do what you are doing. Then he said an emerging company in a recession needs to ask themselves if they really believe in what they are doing. During this, I thought about our own emerging company and our own vision and silently answered ‘yes’ for all of us. He said, “believe in what you believe in and keep going”. Indeed.
Jensen acknowledged that Nvidia “delivered badly last year”. He said it was “OK because we did the right thing for the right reasons.” He said he is not going to slow down but he did examine Nvidia’s priorities regarding parallel computing; they are not going to stop investing and he renewed his commitment to creating and improving developer tools for it.
One of the things Jensen stressed was his disdain for the extreme emphases placed on “financial performance” which he likened to getting grades in school; except now you were being graded by your employees, customers and shareholders. He said, it is far more important to do what you do “for the right reason” and to make the experience worthwhile; one should not go to school just to get good grades. Rather, good grades come from the hard work and effort that you put into learning; if you do it right, you get good results. Jensen reminded his listeners, “Keep the game separate from the score’”. It is very good advice and it was delivered in the most enthusiastic manner possible. You can sum up much of what he says by this: “If you do amazing things, the world notices”. Well, I have to agree with him again as that is my own belief.
The discussion continued after Peddie commented about the low attrition rate at Nvidia compared with other companies. Jensen said he wants to keep one, so that only the people who really fit in well, will work there; in so many words, they both should be happy. It is clearly important for Jensen that his employees believe in their company. He then emphasized how this conference was all about software and about Nvidia providing tools for a currently very tiny market because it is the right thing to do at the right time.
He talked about the few acquisitions that Nvidia has made each year and how important it is for the companies to be matched to each other, as in a marriage. Jensen said he deplored acquiring technology for the sole purpose of keeping it from the market and from the competition. He mentioned he was proud of Nvidia’s promoting the little startup Keyhole Corporation that became google earth. Nvidia is always looking for a worthy company to promote with no limit to their budget for it; depending on need, up to the company’s entire 1.4 Billion dollars if necessary, he added for emphasis.
Jensen said that one should see the world with optimism and to “do good”. He told the emerging companies, “if you don’t build it, they cannot come”. So there will always be some uncertainty which means there are risks to be taken. However, he said it is obtuse to think of “taking” something at the expense of others. Rather one should take advantage of what is already there to do bigger and better things. However, I am not sure how he relates it to gaining marketshare.
As if to answer him, Peddie asked Jensen about the current “squeeze play” by Intel on Nvidia and what they intended to do about it. Jensen answered, “by building amazing things”. He then went on to list the criteria Nvidia uses to determine if they should help an emerging company: 1) it has never been done before, 2) it is incredibly difficult to do, and 3) that company is uniquely qualified to do it – and I thought of our own vision as I mentally checked off ‘yes’ to each one of his requirements.
Peddie then touched on Nvidia’s Fellowship program which provides support for people in the form of scholarships. He did not mention Jensen’s own personal contribution of $30 million dollars last month to build an expanded engineering school at Stanford. The Jen-Hsun Huang School of Engineering Center (as in the rendering below) will feature a four-story building housing ultimately a “bookless” library, conference center and a café.
What makes Nvidia unique is their enthusiasm; their money is not unique – their people are, according to Jensen. And again, he picked the words “exquisite” and “amazing” to describe the level of work and the products he expected his company to produce in striving for perfection. When asked about the next ten years, he responded that “the computing industry will be totally different. Hardware will be less magical”. He said he pictured the day when a “personal computer will come free with a service” and the ones that you buy will be truly amazing.
Jensen went on to say that when you increase performance by 1,000 times, everything changes. He also likened these times to 1995 – a metaphysical 15 year cycle of innovation – when Win95 was released and everything since then has been a refinement of it. He says PC hardware has made great progress but now it is time to advance software. Jensen said the key to future hardware is “efficiency” and that “more of everything is a bad idea”. In other words, he believes hardware power requirements will not go up but remain flat due to innovation. Jensen finally concluded his fireside chat with taking some questions from the audience and he urged people to be enthusiast and optimistic.
After that was a panel discussion dealing with raising capital in difficult financial times but this editor was off to the exhibits and then to learn about CUDA and Nvidia’s new debugging tools as well as some hands on experience with Nexus now integrated with Visual Studio. It was lunch time also.
