{"id":3151,"date":"2009-02-06T16:31:09","date_gmt":"2009-02-06T16:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/?p=3151"},"modified":"2009-02-06T17:31:41","modified_gmt":"2009-02-06T17:31:41","slug":"a-conversation-with-jen-hsun-huang-ceo-nvidia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/a-conversation-with-jen-hsun-huang-ceo-nvidia\/","title":{"rendered":"A conversation with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO Nvidia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, Charlie Rose of PBS interviewed Nvidia’s CEO “Jensen”.\u00a0 I caught this interview and made extensive notes as I could not get to my recorder.\u00a0 Fortunately, you can catch the interview on Charlie Rose’ own website:<\/span><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.charlierose.com\/view\/interview\/10060<\/a><\/p>\n

Here are a few of my notes highlighting this interview.\u00a0 Jensen, as he is called by his friends and employees, stated that about 20-30% of Nvidia’s business is to hard core gamers.\u00a0 Nvidia likes to to think of themselves as\u00a0 “hard core”, like Nike , for cyber-athletes.<\/p>\n

It is a rather personal interview where Charlie Rose did his tech homework very well.\u00a0 Jensen, now age 45, details how he grew up in the USA\u00a0 and was sent to Baptist school in Kentucky with his brother as the only two Chinese kids in that school.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What saved him was his math skills, he said, and he became popular with his classmates by helping them with their homework.\u00a0 He says he cleaned bathrooms in that school.\u00a0 Later he went back to Washington state where he continued his education, specializing in math and science.\u00a0 Jensen highlighted the fact that early exposure to a computer mainframe while still in school confirmed that he would be an engineer.\u00a0 He also said they played StarTrek<\/em> on the mainframe against other schools that had access and he speculated he might have played against Bill Gates.<\/p>\n

One of the most interesting statements that Jensen made, were that all start-ups have an intuition. <\/em>This is <\/em>something we can relate to at ABT.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Jensen is definitely visionary as they considered “sharable\u00a0 interactive” – what they had experienced on the mainframe in school – would be widespread on the Internet now.\u00a0 Jensen actually imagined the online experience of today almost 20 years ago!\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Of course, Charlie Rose asked about the competiton with Intel and Jensen admitted, “there is a tension between us and Intel”.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Jensen actually said the core of the “tension” between Nvidia and Intel “is the battle for the soul of the PC”.<\/p>\n

Of course, this interview is over 30 minutes long and Jensen details the changing purpose of the PC.\u00a0 Originally, it was created as an electronic extension of the typewriter plus a calculator\u00a0 – Word and Excel were the “killer applications” that were based on the CPU’s strengths of text and number crunching.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Of course this new Virtual Reality was made possible by Nvidia’s GPU.\u00a0 So today the “tension” lies in the competition between CPU and GPU, as to what is more important.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Jensen next detailed that his favorite processor is Intel’s Atom – small and light. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Jensen believes shifting to “cloud computing” is actually a supplement to client computing.\u00a0 TV did not destroy radio and the GPU will never take over the job of the CPU, so why should Nvidia reinvent it?\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 He pointed out that Nvidia is investing more into research and development in this recession now than they did last year!!\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0 software egineers have to now think differently about how they program for the PC.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 CUDA is the name of their architecture that is used to interface with their GPUs.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Now CUDA is taught in 50 universities.<\/p>\n

As a lesson for everyone, Jensen explained that Nvidia’s stumbles and adversity were an “unexpected price of innovation”.\u00a0 Evidently the biggest challenges to Nvidia came as a result of intuitive decisions\u00a0 where some turned out much harder because “technology and innovation does not come out in linear ways”, he said.\u00a0 The interview concluded with Jensen stating that Nvidia’s “holy grail” is to make a difference.\u00a0 They want to create a technology that “surprises and delights you”.\u00a0 He projects that your car windshield will be soon augmented with computer graphics to improve the driving experience.<\/p>\n

This interview is well worth viewing in its entirety.\u00a0 Here is the ABT Forum topic devoted to it:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/abt\/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=521<\/a><\/p>\n

Feel free to sign up at our forums and\/or comment below.\u00a0 Signing up at ABT forums is free, quick and painless.\u00a0 There you find our helpful staff of writers and editors devoted to answering your questions.<\/p>\n

-Mark Poppin<\/p>\n

ABT editor<\/p>\n


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