Shoot Tokill Company of the Year
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nvidia 1/2/08 9:57 AM Page 92 æJanuary 7, 2008 COMPANY OF NVIDIA THE YEAR Jen-Hsun Huang NVIDIA’S CHIEF EXECUTIVE INSIDE THE CRYSIS GAME To stay ahead in a merciless business, computer graphics champ Nvidia is setting its own pace | By Brian Caulfield RICK DAHMS FOR FORBES SHOOT TOKILL nvidia 1/2/08 9:57 AM Page 94 NVIDIA COMPANY OF THE YEAR They accost him at airports. They pump him for technical want 3-D power as much online as they do now in desktop information at conferences. Even his son is on his case. When games, and the demand for graphics processors will grow. “The you sell a product that tens of millions of videogame fanatics more content there is, the more visual interest there can be, the rely on, there is no escape. Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun more processing horsepower people need,” says Huang, 44. Huang came home one evening in 2003 to find the latest copy Nvidia’s graphics cards are now the most expensive part of high- of Maximum PC magazine waiting for him. Inside was a harsh performance PCs. Gaming fanatics will frequently supercharge a review of Nvidia’s new graphics card, the brawny set of $1,200 desktop from the likes of Alienware, a Dell subsidiary, with microchips that makes the aliens and bullets come to three- another $1,700 worth of Nvidia graphics chips. The Santa Clara, dimensional life on a personal computer. Calif. firm has 62% of the market for desktop PC graphics cards, up “Dad,” Huang’s then 13-year-old son Spencer, an avid from 57% a year ago, according to Mercury Research. Its archrival gamer, wrote on a sticky note stuck to the page, “I think you ATI stumbled badly last year in the two-company horse race for need to kick it up a notch.” technical superiority and was bought by chipmaker AMD for $5.4 As if he needed the extra encouragement. In the past four billion. In a PC industry racked by deflation, Nvidia has managed to years Huang has taken Nvidia from a trailing position to domi- increase its gross margin from 29% in 2004 to a current 46%. In the nance in the breakneck, highly lucrative graphics-chip business. fiscal year ending in a few weeks Nvidia will gross $4 billion, up Intel gets all the credit for being the brains inside most com- 33%, and net $900 million, up 50%. Since Huang took the company puters, but without Nvidia’s graphics cards there would be no public in 1999, Nvidia’s shares have risen 21-fold, edging out even high-definition Web video, no visual kick from battling aliens the mighty Apple over the same time period. Such accomplish- in the lush digital forests of the Crysis game. ments, over the last 12 months and the past five years, earn Nvidia The two-dimensional world of the Web is rapidly going 3-D the title of FORBES’ Company of the Year. with immersive applications such as Google Earth and World of Warcraft. That $10 graphics processor used in cheap PCs Huang is now turning his focus beyond gamers to a host of won’t cut it anymore, unless all you’re doing is looking at low- new customers that will need number- quality YouTube videos. This is the age of laptops and desktops crunching power: oil companies doing 1999 that can deftly handle hi-def video playback and video editing, deep-sea seismic analysis, Wall Street 22 MILLION TRANSISTORS with help from graphics cards that start at $200 and go up from banks modeling portfolio risk and biolo- Nvidia GeForce 256 there. This is where Nvidia rules. gists visualizing molecular structures to “What if Google Earth had a 3-D representation of every find drug target sites. Pricing 150,000 equity options in a sec- single building, every single square meter on Earth, and you ond or assessing how much crude oil sits in a pocket 6 miles could access it in the blink of an eye?” Huang says. “Take the below the earth’s surface are massively parallel mathematical Forbidden City in China. I know the model exists. We’ve seen computing problems for which graphics processors are pecu- BLOOMBERG NEWS (3) the models. It is photorealistic. It is cinematic. It is breathtaking. liarly equipped. All of those experiences are possible already.” A typical Intel chip such as the Core Duo is called a central As bandwidth becomes cheap and ubiquitous, people will processing unit, or CPU. Like a sprinter (or, more appropriately, a pair of them), this CPU is both fast and extremely versatile, but it can do only so much computing in the space of a microsec- NEVER ENOUGH ond. It is ideal for tackling tasks that require lots of interactivity, Gamers are always hungry for new for example, calling up data from a hard drive in response to a eye candy, and Nvidia keeps them command from a user. To speed those tasks along, CPUs are satiated with a faster graphics card 1995 built with onboard memory to store the next string of com- every six months or so. Its latest 1 MILLION chips can render hundreds of millions TRANSISTORS mands to be carried out. of polygons per second, up from Nvidia NV1 By contrast an Nvidia graphics processing unit, or GPU, ren- 1 million per second ten years ago. Source: Nvidia. 1993 Nvidia founded on 1995 Computer- 1999 Nvidia Feb. 17, Chief Executive Jen- generated image goes public on Hsun Huang’s 30th birthday. from the game the Nasdaq Id Software releases rDoom, Virtua Fighter 1q stock exchange. which pits a futuristic space by Sega. Created marine against with Nvidia’s NV1 2000 Acquires the a hellish array GPU, which had assets of 3dfx Interac- of creatures. 1 million transistors. tive, once a key rival. nvidia 1/2/08 9:57 AM Page 95 2006 2007 681 MILLION TRANSISTORS 754 MILLION TRANSISTORS Nvidia GeForce 8 Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS ders graphics by simultaneously hashing out the same problem for 2005 multiple pixels: textures, lighting and smooth rendering of shapes 302 MILLION What’s next? Using Nvidia to tackle classic TRANSISTORS flying across the screen. That makes a GPU more like a brigade Nvidia GeForce 7 engineering challenges of the sort that once marching in serried ranks. A GPU is less versatile but for repeti- preoccupied Cray. tive tasks much more powerful than a CPU. The graphics chip This year Nvidia delivered its Tesla line of muscle- has less need to store upcoming bound computing machines built around graphics processors. operations in memory, so it can cram Now the Nvidia chips teenagers use to blast each other in 2004 in more processing cores than a CPU 222 MILLION TRANSISTORS Unreal Tournament are basically the same ones used by scien- can. Intel has up to 4 processing cores Nvidia GeForce 6 tists at Evolved Machines in Palo Alto, Calif. who are simulating on a single chip; Nvidia’s neurons used by the brain to see and smell. “You can see essen- new GeForce 8800 GTS tially a very high performance cluster the size of a desktop, at 2003 has 128. 130 MILLION TRANSISTORS the cost of a desktop,” says Nvidia board member Steven Chu, a Parallel computing Nvidia GeForce FX Nobel Prize-winning physicist and director of the Lawrence has been the holy grail of Berkeley National Laboratory. supercomputer design almost since the dawn of the silicon age. Mighty Intel has noticed. In 2008 it plans to demonstrate a Parallelism—simultaneous multicore chip named Larrabee that may steal some of the 2002 operations on sets of num- market for high-end graphics chips. Intel is also a threat at 63 MILLION TRANSISTORS AMD Nvidia GeForce4 bers—is suited to many engi- the low end, where it competes with Nvidia and to sell the neering tasks, such as bomb cheaper integrated graphics chipsets used in budget desktop design, weather forecasting and image processing. Seymour Cray, computers and many notebooks. AMD, having digested its the supercomputer genius of the 1970s, had a form of parallelism acquisition of ATI, is coming after Nvidia with a pair of power- with his vector- processing computers. The same kind of ap- ful new graphics cards starting at $220. “Their relative position proach lay behind a generation of “array processors” used in versus Nvidia has improved compared to six months ago,” says computerized X-ray machines and seismic analyzers. But paral- Dean McCarron, president of chip tracker Mercury Research. lel processing proved to be much easier to describe than to exe- AMD is also building ATI’s graphics capabilities into a new CPU cute on a commercial scale. The technology humbled some once that may see the light of day in the second half of 2009. promising outfits, like Danny Hillis’ Thinking Machines and Nvidia can never get complacent. Its customers are a fickle Larry Ellison’s NCube. bunch, always ready to tear up their PCs to cram in the next How curious that parallelism is finally proving itself in, of all hot graphics card from ATI. In 2007 Hewlett-Packard began things, the manufacture of toys. The Nvidia GPUs are in, for selling a PC called the Blackbird 002 that allows gamers to example, the original Xbox and the newer Sony PlayStation 3. use either a pair of Nvidia graphics cards or a pair from ATI, 2001 Microsoft 2002 ATI 2003 ATI wins 2005 Sony 2006 AMD 2007 Nvidia releases its Tesla releases the Xbox releases its the contract to unveils the agrees to acquire high-performance computing prod- gaming console in Radeon 9700 design graphics rPlayStation 3, ATI for $5.4 billion ucts.