Vision - July/August 2008 - (Page 11)

It has the ability to surf the Web with all of the Web 2.0 experiences, it has the ability to present high-definition movies, it has a 3D touch UI, and all of that is consistent with NVIDIA’s heritage. Obviously visual computing is going to be a very large part of it. But the amazing thing about Tegra is that the entire computer consumes less than 1/20th the amount of power as the lowest-power personal computer. It took NVIDIA nearly three years and nearly 1,000 man years in development. This is one of the most ambitious from-the-ground-up computer designs in the last five years anywhere in the world. We are in the process now of engaging with OEMs all around the world. We have wonderful designers everywhere, and I’m expecting those OEM integrations to be available by the early part of next year. There are going to be some really amazing handheld devices, mobile Internet devices and smart phones that integrate Tegra that consume less power, weigh less and cost a lot less. Another big thing is a technology that we call CUDA. It’s a new capability that is inside our GPU. The whole idea is that with this super computer’s capabilities, we can do all kinds of amazing things for consumer electronics types of applications. For example, we can use it for physics simulation, so instead of these really rigid and rather limiting animations inside of a video game, the leaves will be blowing, the water will be flowing, the clouds will be moving and the animation of the characters will be much more fluid and realistic. Every football player on a team will be moving by themselves. Every time they tackle each other, they will fall in a different way. NVIDIA Top Stats Founded: 1993 Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA Business Model: Semiconductors and visual computing technologies Sales: $4.1 billion Net Income: $797.6 million Employees: 5,000 worldwide Offices: Asia, Europe, the Americas Stock Symbol: NVDA Website: www.NVIDIA.com The major difference is that when you are inside a 3-dimensional environment, you can go anywhere you like, you can look at it from any perspective you like. So you literally could be watching a football game and it’s synchronized with the real football game. All of the characters are moving like the real football game—the only difference is that you can be within it. In the next five to ten years, the boundaries between a video game and a major sports event, are going to start to blur. benefited scientists, doctors and researchers all over the world. One of my favorite areas is augmented reality. In the future, you will be able to put on goggles that will be connected to your computer and you will see an overlay of real-time, ultra-sound reconstruction. It is overlaid with the human person that you are sitting in front of and looking at. So all of a sudden it looks like you have x-ray vision. Can you imagine that? You take ultrasound information and reconstruct it, pipe it into your glasses and overlay it on top of the human that you are looking at. It’s pretty fabulous stuff. Those kinds of technologies are made possible because of the billions of dollars that we pour into GPU R&D which is designed primarily to advance consumer electronics. Do you do most of your R&D in the U.S.? We do R&D all over the world. About 60 percent of our company is here, but we also have large sites in Taiwan, China and India. Our philosophy is that there are smart people everywhere and we are an intellectual capital company. Our fuel is good ideas. So I need to tap into the good ideas of smart people all over the world. How are NVIDIA’s products enabling advances in the medical, scientific and biotech industries? It used to be that space exploration was the primary source of innovation and technology development in our country. Then the military and the efforts around DARPA were the reasons for our investments. But today, the most important source of innovation comes from consumers. If you have something that consumers desire like graphics technology, we can use that as a platform for doing very substantial R&D investment that can benefit exploration, science, research and medicine. What we are seeing now is that consumer demand for Geforce and Tegra is helping us fund the R&D necessary to advance scientific research. Take a look at the technology that we are putting into video games today and that technology is identical to the technology that will help you do reconstruction of CT scans in realtime, allow us to discover oil reserves deep in the ground or help doctors visualize how viruses behave and how a particular drug can defeat a virus. We can visualize and simulate that using video game technology. What we have done to advance consumers’ enjoyment of computers has Are Intel and AMD gunning for the graphics processor business? The best way to stay ahead of the competition is not to worry about the competition. You can’t build and do amazing things by emulating what your competition has done already. You have to build things that the world has never seen before. Ultimately our competition is ourselves. We compete against what we have built already, and we have to exceed that expectation. A billion dollars of R&D a year later, we delight consumers all over the world. How good can graphics get? We are just getting started. Today when you see a video game, you can tell that it’s a video game. But in the future, for example, you could have a Tiger Woods Masters Golf Tournament and the actual play of the Masters Tournament is synchronized to your game console that perfectly mimics the actual play of the golf tournament. You could choose to play in it. So you now can add yourself to the game and play with Tiger. He would go up and shoot his hole, and the ball ends up in exactly the same place as what’s actually happening in the real Master’s Tournament. In the future, graphics will be not only amazingly realistic, but almost identical. www.ce.org What will NVIDIA look like in five years? We are helping the industry, artists and creators to design amazing things, and we are helping people have a wonderful computer experience. We have made a lot of investments—$5 billion to date. In five years, we want to be one of the most innovative and influential companies in the world that makes a difference. • July/August 2008 11 http://www.NVIDIA.com 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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