Vision - July/August 2008 - (Page 10)

visionAry CE’s Cutting-EdgE LEadErs ] • [ by Cindy LoffLEr stEvEns NVIDIA sales soared to $4.1 billion in fiscal 2007. Since the company went public in 1999, the company’s shares have risen 21-fold. This led Forbes to name NVIDIA Company of the Year because of its “breakneck, highlylucrative graphics-chip business, giving highdefinition to Web videos and bringing a visual kick to digital video games.” But change is coming with both Intel and AMD promising to deliver improved graphics that will be packaged with their core microprocessors. The wild card is Intel’s multicore chip, named “Larrabee”. It could steal away some of the market for high-end graphics chips. Also AMD is building sophisticated graphics capabilities into its CPUs, competing for a slice of the market. Huang believes that consumers want expanded graphical capabilities provided by the large number of processors that can be packed onto a dedicated graphics card. As graphics power continues to expand and chipsets grow smaller, he plans to put them in all displays. He is betting that the architecture of computers is evolving along with consumers’ desire for 3-D games, imagery and video. NVIDIA will be well positioned as it expands into handhelds, cell phones and even dashboards. A Look at Visual Computing he two-dimensional world of the Web is morphing into a 3-D immersive experience with applications like Google Earth and World of Warcraft. While computers today mainly convey text information and 2-D images, advances in graphics processing will change what’s on display screens everywhere. Consumers want PCs that easily can handle hi-def video playback and video editing with help from relatively inexpensive graphics cards. A perfect fit for the vision of NVIDIA Co-Founder, President and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. Huang was born in Taiwan, and when he was nine, his parents sent him and his older brother to live in Tacoma, Wash. with relatives. At the age of 30, the Stanford-educated engineer co-founded NVIDIA in 1993, after working at AMD and LSI Logic. Huang and his co-founders wanted to improve the visual experience for computing. The company took advantage of the “fabless” trend that lets a chip firm focus on design and save billions in capital spending by outsourcing production to Asian factories like Taiwan Semiconductor and United Microelectronics. The company has grown to become the world’s largest maker of graphics processing units (GPUs), the semiconductors that allow realistic gaming, 3-D imagery and video in PCs. In jeans and a brown t-shirt, Huang spoke with CE Vision in the conference room/library next to his office complete with “squatters from Taiwan”. The company had just introduced the Tegra family of processors a few days before, the world’s first single-chip computer—so tiny it can fit on top of a U.S. dime. NVIDIA is positioned as the only independent graphics chipmaker able to deliver processors for computers running the visually intensive operating systems Microsoft Vista and Apple OS X. When main rival ATI was acquired by chipmaker AMD in 2006, T of our wonderful images in a 3D world. Those kinds of experiences are going to be popular and possible on almost any type of consumer electronics device in the future. Do you think someday the brains of the computer will be the display? In fact, Sun had a phrase where they said, the network is the computer. I actually think the display is the computer. What you see in front of you—your feelings about that computer and your computing experience—is related to what you see. Notice the most visual mobile device ever invented became the most popular phone—the iPhone. The first thing everyone said is that it looks beautiful because of the graphics on it, the way that it presents information and the way you select your photographs and your movies. It’s just a wonderful experience. So I think that your display is the computer, and therefore, visual computing is more important than ever. NVIDIA was named Forbes Company of the Year. What’s next? I think the Forbes article simply recognizes that as a technology company solely focused on the visual computing experience—we are the best at doing it. Because of portable displays and LCDs and low-powered displays, we now can have a visual experience anywhere we go. I also think that what you see on your computer display is a portal to everything computing will be in the future. So whether it’s enjoying your video games or surfing a website—the visual experience is important. Obviously in the consumer electronics industry, visual computing first came to the forefront with game consoles, and so all of our game console experiences are visually rich. But in the future, almost every television will be able to have an Internet experience and all of those Internet experiences will increasingly be visual. When that happens, we’ll be able to fly to any city we want using Google Earth or we’ll be able to navigate through all What are some of the most graphically compelling CE areas for NVIDIA? Apple is one of the few companies in the world that can have a vision, create the entire computer behind it and deliver a wonderful, highly-desirable product with all of the services behind it. No other computer company that I know has all of those capabilities. So on the one hand, Apple sets the bar, if you will, and creates a whole new direction for the industry. Where we come in is we know how to build wonderful computers. Tegra is the tiniest computer that has ever been built. www.ce.org 10 July/August 2008 http://www.ce.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Vision - July/August 2008

Vision - July/August 2008 Contents Shapiro's Spectrum In This Issue The Economist C4 Trends Visionary Embracing Disrupting Technology Vaulting Ahead with Your Brand International Risk Stop Boomerang Products CEA Newsline Tech Speak Tech Policy Going Global Eye on Business Market Insider Just the Stats

Vision - July/August 2008

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