By Roland Piquepaille
Jen-Hsun Huang founded Nvidia in 1993. Since 1993, Nvidia has grown 100 percent annually over the past four years to become the world's largest maker of graphics processing units (GPUs). And it's earning money: last year, the company made $177 million on $1.4 billion in sales.Wired summarizes it this way: In effect, Nvidia has become the Intel of graphics.
Nvidia executives seem reverent when discussion turns to Intel, but they're quick to drop appearances whenever there's talk about the future of the industry. "What we've done in the past five years is staggering," says VP of investor relations Michael Hara. "What we can do in the next five years is going to blow your mind. In 10 years, we should be bigger than Intel."
As the specialized chips around it have become commodified, the CPU has survived thanks to its power and versatility. But when it comes to multimedia - and that's where the demand is - the CPU gives way to the graphics chip, which is hundreds of times more efficient. The latest GeForce, scheduled to launch this summer, will have nearly 120 million transistors - more than double those on a Pentium 4. Unlike other specialized chips, the GPU will not likely shrink so much that it will be swallowed by the CPU. If anything, the reverse could happen. After all, no one needs a speedy 2-GHz CPU to run Excel.
So, it's easy to think about a PC where the GPU would be the boss and the CPU only one of the executives.
As says Huang, "Some people say the network is the computer. We believe the display is the computer. Anywhere there's a pixel, that's where we want to be."
Do you think that the current Wintel platform dominance will be replaced one day by a WinVidia one? Tell me what you think.
Source: Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Wired 10.07, July 2002
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