Nvidia CEO on PS3, Nintendo and Xbox 360

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/200..._ceo_an_e.html

Nvidia CEO: An Extended Q&A

Dean Takahashi, 12:01 AM in Dean Takahashi, Gaming

Huang Here's an extended version of our interview with Jen-Hsun Huang,
CEO of Nvidia, the leading maker of graphics chips for gamers.

Video games and their demand for better graphics has made Jen-Hsun
Huang's Nvidia into one of the hottest chip companies. But Huang
doesn't fare so well when he is playing video games with his
16-year-old son and his 15-year-old daughter. They have an unfair
advantage because they can invest more time in Counter-Strike Source
than he can. But Huang says the game that he likes the most is called
"Nvidia.'' Huang sat down with me to discuss the impact he sees the
graphics chip having in future technologies. (photo credit: Len Lehman)

What are some things to know about you?

My priorities are my family and my company and that's it. My perfect
day is spending time with just my family, deciding what to cook for
dinner, going grocery shopping, cooking dinner and opening a bottle of
wine. My daughter goes downstairs and picks out a bottle of wine. She
has wonderful taste. We all cook dinner and eat in front of a movie.
I'm incredibly proud of my kids. I'm glad they are wonderful people and
I'm glad they can do something -- as black belts -- beyond anything
I've been able to do. They can be so good at their karate. The most
important thing to know about a CEO is you can't be successful unless
your family and in particular your wife wants you to be successful.

You came to the U.S. as an immigrant at age nine from Taiwan. You had a
harder start in life than a lot of people. How much do you think about
that experience today?

Part of being successful is having the ability to make sacrifices. To
endure a lot of hardship for something you believe in and having a lot
of patience. Those are all elements of being successful. When you are
an immigrant to this country, you have to endure some hardship. When I
came to the United States, my older brother -- who was ten years old --
and I were the only Chinese people Kentucky had ever seen, it seemed. I
know we were the only Chinese people that Oneida, Kentucky, had ever
seen. We lived in Tacoma, Wash., for a few months. Even then, we looked
like foreigners. You have to endure some amount of individualism, be
self confident, and be comfortable with yourself. Growing up as an
immigrant, It was not easy back in the good old days.
capq Does that make you a different kind of CEO?

Sacrifice, enduring challenges, seeing obstacles as an opportunity.
Being able to deal with adversity. Those are characteristics that all
CEOs need to have. I think I handle those things very easily and very
comfortably. I make sacrifices easily. I'm impatient about doing great
things and building a great company.

What makes it to the list of hardships you have to deal with now?

Our company is doing really well. We are building great products. You
know I've always believed that graphics is one of the most important
technologies for this decade. It is very evident that the graphics
processing unit is becoming important in all kinds of devices whether
it's game consoles or cell phones and what not. More and more of the
innovation we do is at the intersection of computing technology and
consumer applications. More of those applications relate to multimedia
and to graphics. The growth is there. Our strategic relevance is higher
than ever before. We are organized better than ever before. We have
strong leadership. I don't know if we have an immediate adversity. We
have challenges. How do you go from a $3 billion company to a $15
billion company, where your employees are spread out all over the
world, where you're building products for every industry? From PCs to
consumer boxes, to automobiles. We're building technologies for a lot
of different markets and different industries. Scaling the company is a
big challenge. It is a cultural, management and leadership challenge.

It seems like where you have gotten to has almost been accidental. Do
you look at it that way? Will the graphics chip always be in the
personal computer? Will all of the chips in the computer merge into one
chip? For a decade, you've been able to grab more than your fair share
of computing power inside the PC. How accidental is this?

Serendipity plays a role in all successful companies. We had more than
our fair share of serendipity. Of course, people say that serendipity
comes to those who work the hardest and are the smartest. We work
incredibly hard. But I would say that the question about whether
graphics being integrated into other chips roots itself in the idea
that graphics is good enough. We were confronted with that question
with GeForce 256 in 1999. That was on par with the Reality Engine
supercomputer that Silicon Graphics used to sell. The fill rate, the
performance, the throughput of the chips was amazing. In 1999, we were
confronted with that question. I thought we made one of the most
important decisions for not only our company but the entire industry.
That was going to programmability. As you know, investing in
programmability, which ultimately ended up in GeForce FX, made the
graphics chip far more programmable. But the cost was so high. It was
quite a burden on our company for a couple of years. I would calculate
that the amount of profitability lost on GeForce FX was $200 million a
year for two years. It was almost $500 million in lost profit. That was
a half a billion dollar risk we took going to a completely programmable
model. Our vision is simple. Fixed function graphics accelerators will
limit the long term growth of the industry. There are so
many things you can do with a fixed function device. If I give you a
Ginsu knife, and that was all you could do, what kind of artistic
things can you do with it? Going to an infinitely programmable device,
we made graphics essentially into an infinite palette for artistic
expression. Look at all of the applications that we are seeing now.
It's possible to use this graphics processor to express all different
kinds of graphics, from toon shading to all kinds of film quality
shading. You can do X-Ray shading and all kinds of amazing looks you
couldn't do before. We invented, if you will, the paint brush. And now
computer programmers can use this computer paint brush to articulate
anything. That opened the horizon for us to really grow into what we
are today. The GPUs are becoming increasingly complex, increasingly
flexible. There is so much more that the software programmers want us
to capture.

Is there a collision you can foresee with the Intel microprocessor
because you made the move to programmability?

Programmability has different types. There are scalar programs. That
uses a scalar microprocessor with a flow of instructions and it fetches
instructions out of a cache. It processes data in a data-dependent way.
That sort of programming is what microprocessors are really wonderful
at. We are not very good at that kind of processing. Our processors are
adept at processing large amounts of data that have less dependency.
Our processor is more akin to a stream processor. The types of
architectures are radically different. Just as the CPU can run DSP
programs, a DSP is much better at running DSP programs. There are
different types of programming models, whether it is signal processing
for baseband, or voice. There are scalar processors. There are image
processors for enormously large data sets which is what a GPU does.

If Moore's Law gives you unlimited numbers of transistors, a few years
from now you could put a CPU in the corner of your chip, and Intel
could put a graphics chip in their CPUs. Why or why not would this
happen?


There is integration at two levels. There is the unification of
processing models. There is the CPU and the GPU, combined together in a
unified processor model. I think the latter is very unlikely. Although
on balance, transistors are free, we are challenged because most of the
opportunities require low power. So you have to have efficient
programming. It is far more efficient to run a program written for CPUs
on a CPU, and it's far more efficient to run a program for GPUs on a
GPU. There is the issue of power efficiency and cost efficiency. Brute
force is not a very good option. There is the second approach of
combining two processors onto one chip. In some markets, that would
happen. For example, integrated graphics combines two chips into one
where the technology is not very demanding. The market requirements are
much slower in commercial, corporate desktops and others that require
very little graphics. But if the graphics technology is a defining part
of that system, whether it is a game console or high-end PC or
workstations, the two devices innovate at different rhythms. There is
no reason the two devices want to merge into one in that case. In fact,
combining them into one makes it very difficult to combine two modern
cores into the same substrate on the same schedule. There, what causes
the two to move apart is not difference in programming models but
differences in market requirements and rhythms. By putting it in one
chip, you end up getting the worst of both worlds.


So you are stuck with Intel and they are stuck with you?
capa Our primary focus is to advance the GPU. In the PC market, we
focus on the marketplaces that value the the contributions we make.
Workstations, the gaming platforms, multimedia machines, media centers.
That's where graphics matters. We don't participate in all parts of the
PC industry. We focus on market niches where we can add value. In the
other markets, we are connected to the PowerPC/Cell microprocessor in
the PlayStation 3. In handhelds, we are connected to SH
microprocessors, Arm microprocessors. For embedded applications, we are
connected to PowerPCs and what not. Our focus is the GPU. With respect
to the CPU, we try to be as agnostic as we can. We focus on the
marketplace.

As your company becomes bigger, is it harder to find the growth in
graphics alone?

Someday, that is going to happen. But it's just not happening right
now. The thing we talked about earlier, more than ever, graphics
processing is more important in all of these digital devices. As the
number of digital devices explodes, we find ourselves relevant in a lot
of new markets that we were never part of before. You could also think
of the importance of GPUs by just thinking about the number of the
liquid crystal displays around the world and the quality of these
displays. That's what is driving the consumption of GPUs.


Do you think you picked the right horse in the video game war this
time?


capa You can't build chips for all the game consoles. That's not
possible. They would all like a slightly different style from the
others. Difference is important. The same chip company would have
difficulty designing chips for the different styles. It's also so high
stakes that you need to focus. No one has enough extraneous resources
around to build chips for all the game consoles. You have to build one
or so at a time. In a lot of ways, they also pick you. Sony picked us
and Microsoft didn't. It's not so much we don't pick the horses. I
don't think that working with Sony is wrong. There is no way that is
going to be wrong. There are many wonderful things that Sony did. I'm
excited that they made Blu-ray high-definition storage as a standard
part of the PlayStation 3 platform. The first PlayStation had a CD-ROM
drive. The PlayStation 2 had DVD. It makes no sense for the PlayStation
3 to use DVDs. To postpone it by a few months so they could include
Blu-Ray was a master stroke. When that comes out, it's going to look so
much more advanced than last-generation game consoles. I think that was
a wonderful call on their part.


When you look back on your relationship with Microsoft on the Xbox, did
it serve your purpose of getting into the game console business?


I always felt it was inevitable we would work on consoles. We invest
$750 million a year in R&D in graphics processing. No other company
invests that much in graphics processing today. This is such an
incredibly deep technology and there is so much more to do. It makes
sense that in the long-term we would work on game consoles as well. The
others can't keep up with the R&D that we do. That part makes perfect
sense to me.

Are the graphics in games as good as movies now?

We are far from movies. People use "Toy Story'' as a standard. But Toy
Story is an animation. We know that every movie is 3-D these days.
"Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith'' was all 3-D except for
the human characters. The actors were standing in front of blue screens
the whole time. People didn't realize they were watching an animated
movie the entire time. With "Superman Returns,'' you can't really put a
camera on a person and have him fly through a metropolis. That entire
movie was animated. It was one big computer-generated movie with a guy
in tights in front of a blue screen. You look at that imagery, and you
know we are nowhere near that level of imagery.



Where do you want to see graphics go?

I would like to see it go in a couple of directions. I would like it to
be easier to access. Games are so hard. They're intimidating to get
into. The controls are pretty complicated. These are complicated games
with complex story lines. I would like to see simpler, episodic games
where they could let you play for 30 minutes at a time. They could show
it to you 30 minutes at a time and you could play a little bit of it
for a long period of time. And if you want to make episode games that
have more storytelling, you're going to have to make the games more
realistic. Right now the graphics is simply not at a level where you
could use it to tell human drama or some kind of a deep story without
facial articulation and good environmental effects to pull off the
story telling. I wouldn't mind it if the business model of games was
more episodic and I wouldn't mind it if video games were more
realistic.

Are photorealistic games just around the corner?

We are a good solid 10 years away from photorealism. In the next
several years, we will still just be learning to do the basics of film,
like motion blur, depth of field -- all of that stuff alone chews up a
lot of graphics processing. We're pretty excited about moving to
high-dynamic range where the color system has the fidelity of what we
see in real life. The images don't seem realistic yet. Articulating a
human form and human animation, the subtlties of humans and nature, are
still quite a ways away for us.

What is exciting about putting graphics into cell phones?

Today, a cell phone is a phone. When the PC industry first started out,
it had a keyboard and a monitor. People asked why do you need a $3,000
device to replace a typewriter. And so, clearly, the PC is much more
than a typewriter. In the long term, people will discover the cell
phone is much more than a phone. We will discover it is one of our most
important personal computing devices. We just compute with it in a
different way than we compute with a computer or a game console. But
it's a computer nonetheless. And these computers are going to be
amazing. The video is going to have graphics and video. It's going to
have all of the same virtues that you have in your PC today in a
smaller form factor. The use will be different. It will be a lot more
services and a lot less applications. Shorter enjoyment. The
applications will be applets. The experience will be just as rich. All
of that kind of innovation related to multimedia is what we are about.



How are you betting with your engineering team these days?

That's a good question. If you are spending three quarters of a billion
dollars in R&D, you're investing that much. Our managers are really
fund managers who are investing three quarters of a billion dollars
each year. If the return on investment is not better than what the
market can do by itself, the company is not going to do well over time.
Where are we betting? We are betting a lot on the cell phone, believing
that multimedia will be an important part of these devices. With GPUs,
we are betting a huge amount on programmability. GPUs are going to
become more programmable, easier to write programs, and support much
more complex programs. For graphics, of course, not for running a
spreadsheet.

What do you think of Intel's troubles these days, given how big it has
become? What
lesson is there for you as your company becomes bigger?

I don't understand their internal challenges. From outside the company,
all great companies that have a winning hand will run into the same
thing. Pentium 4 had a wonderful architecture and was an incredible
market success. But the obvious thing to do with it was to make it a
better Pentium 4. They took a good idea and kept scaling it. And over
time, it stopped scaling. There are many products that eventually don't
scale indefinitely. What they experienced was no different than what
any other successful company would experience. You play the same hand
over and over and eventually it stops working for you. In their case,
power got in the way and the movement toward portability got in the
way.

What do you observe on the sidelines of the Intel-AMD competition?

Intel is large and they can build an entire platform. AMD's advantage
is that they are small, nimble and very focused. They can exploit the
seams that a large company leaves behind. That's what they did. They
exploited the fact that the enthusiast and video game market for PCs
was still very large and performance still mattered. They collaborated
with people that can help them build entire platforms like us.

Can you exploit the competition between them?

We can support both processors and always have. I don't know that we
exploit the competition between them. We have plenty of competition
ourselves. The advantage of Intel is they can innovate across the
entire platform. The advantage of AMD is they have an open platform and
they co-opt the entire platform.

What games are you playing?

I'm waiting for Call of Duty 3. I'm not playing anything right now. I'm
playing Nvidia.
It's Nvidia 3.0.

What was Nvidia 1.0?

Nvidia 1.0 was building 3-D graphics. Creating the consumer 3-D market.
That was Nvidia 1.0. Discovering and creating strategies that made it
possible for us to leave the other start-ups behind. Nvidia 2.0 was
expanding into other segments of the PC market. We focused intensely on
the desktop PC market. We moved into notebooks and workstations. It
ended when we got into the original Xbox. It was still a PC
architecture, but it was for a completely different market. Nvidia 3.0
is about taking the GPU into completely different markets. From PCs to
consumer electronics to handsets. Expanding it into markets where
graphics matters.

What will Windows Vista do for you?

If you look at the simple math of it, the number of GPUs that can run
Windows Vista well, DX 9 and beyond, and the number of integrated
graphics chips that are currently shipping, is far less than 50 percent
of the market. Let's say it is 25 percent of the market. But we know in
two years, Vista will be 100 percent of the market. So what that says
is we have to from where we are today, where integrated graphics is not
capable of running Windows Vista Premium, to a point where Vista will
be 100 percent of the market. That will prompt us to think there will
be a surge in demand for GPUs. The question is how long that surge will
last: two years or four years? It's hard to say. One of the secondary
dynamics of Windows Vista is that very shortly after Windows Vista
launches, you'll see all sorts of applications that have gone
completely 3-D. Excel is going to go 3-D. Everything goes 3-D. Then
there will be more consumption of GPU capabilities. That will prompt a
second wave of consumption for GPUs.

Is it going to be a tough road to get there?

Whether it is GPUs or integrated graphics, it's not entirely clear. The
more the operating system uses graphics, the better it is for us. In
the beginning we'll see a surge of demand for GPUs, but then after that
we will see a surge in demand for integrated graphics. We'll
participate in both markets.

Doesn't it make sense for Intel to go deeper into graphics with
stand-alone GPUs if
Vista is going to do that for the market? And doesn't it make sense for
you to go deeper into
integrated graphics chip sets?

I think so. I don't know what their plans are. You will have to ask
them. There is a market for GPUs obviously. This is a market we are
intimate with and we're very good at. The R&D for GPUs is no longer
insignificant. Although we are a much smaller company, the number of
engineers who are world class at building world-class GPUs is not
insignificant. Whatever decision they make is going to be a big one.

And for you to go in the other direction?

Well we build integrated graphics for AMD today. We constantly evaluate
integrated graphics
for Intel. We need to focus on where we can add value.

What do you think of the health of Silicon Valley?

Jobs are great. Too great. It seems like Silicon Valley went through a
slump and it is doing fabulously. Restaurants are getting filled up
again. Not as crazy as it once was during the Internet boom. For a
while there, restaurant owners were bringing in more high-end foods
because these entreprenuers wanted the best possible cuisines. It's
much more normal now. We are more mature about the Internet boom. There
is still a lot of innovation going on. There are still a lot of
start-ups. That's great to see.

How badly do your kids beat you in games?

Completely badly. It doesn't matter what game we play. Both kids beat
me. It's particularly
embarrassing when Madison beats me.

What is their game of choice?

The first-person shooter, Counter-Strike Source. Madison and Spencer
both like Source.

For a while, the cadence of graphics chips was to move at twice the
speed of Moore's
Law and get a new chip out every six months. Is that the schedule
still?

The high-end GPU still comes out every six months. We announced the
7900 GTX a year ago and
six months later the GX2. You do have to offer a new way of bringing
graphics chip to the market every six months and we haven't seen that
change. We have done that in a multitude of ways. We have done that
with SLI. We have done it with SLI on a single card we call GX 2.
Between the combination of all these components, we still increase
performance by a factor of two every six months.

What does SLI mean to the market where you can get more graphics
chips into each PC?

SLI is probably one of the most important innovations that we have
brought in the last several years. It's an enormous brand now. It's a
community. People who have GPUs with SLI, motherboards with SLI, PCs
with SLI. You can go on eBay and buy SLI stuff. It's a community and an
ecosystem unto itself now. The thing that resonates with the market on
several fronts. You could never get enough graphics performance. These
large 30-inch displays with 2500 x 1900 resolution. That's a lot of
pixels. That's four million pixels. You're going to need a pretty hefty
GPU to drive it. Those four-million pixel displays are beautiful. You
have these high-resolution screens and you never have enough
performance. The new generation of gamers that really require
self-expression, like people buying the Toyota Scion and modding it.
This includes women. Car modders. Myspace. It's about self-expression.
What SLI tapped into was to allow people to upgrade and configure their
PC to their personalities.

How do you look at these high-end gamer PC companies that are selling a
$5,000 custom paint
job for a PC? Voodoo can sell a $10,000 personal computer?

The people they sell to are enthusiasts. They aren't gamers. They are
buying the Mercedes SL 50 AMGs. It is an after-market modification.
There are all kinds of car companies building after-market
enhancements. That is what these enthusiast PC companies are doing. It
suggests that the PC will follow home electronics in that way. There is
enthusiast hi-fi equipment and there are radios and stereos. There are
people out there who want the best and can pay for the best. That
market for PCs is developing.

What's the secret to marketing to those folks and hanging onto them at
the same time
you are trying to go mainstream?

Nvidia has, if you look at our company and contrast it with Via or SiS,
arguably ATI, we are the company that people who want to build high
image, high impact, high brand come to. If you want to build the most
leading-edge workstation or media center or notebook or game PC, or
PlayStation 3, or a 3G cell phone from Motorola. They see us as the
technology company that can help them create something very new, high
image, high impact, and high brand. That is what Nvidia is. We do that
through innovation and R&D. But we have to bring new ideas. The
invention of the programmable shader is one of those ideas. The
invention of SLI is one of those ideas. The invention of PureVideo HD
is one of those ideas. You have to take risks and you have to be
willing to make mistakes and build something pretty amazing.

How do you look at ATI?

They are a formidable competitor. They have wonderful people. It's the
same way
I've seen them before.

Given how the Xbox 360 turned out, did you have any regret about not
winning the graphics
chip for that console?

Not at all. We could not afford to build the graphics for the 360. Our
most important asset is our people. If we use our people on a project
where the economic return is not good enough, and there are other
projects we could be working on, then we're going to lose money. We
were a lot smaller company than ATI at the time. Maybe ATI could afford
it and we couldn't. I know I couldn't afford it. I would love to build
it. I just can't afford it.

ATI is excited about unified shaders. If you pull back, how do you see
if your people are making the right decisions?

For each one of our generations, we need to have a vision of what we
want to do. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to come up with a
new architecture. I don't know what they've built for next generation.
It comes down to a different system vision for what we are trying to
achieve.

Are you manufacturing the RSX for Sony now?


It is in production. It has been for some time.

Do you have a PlayStation 3 in your home?

Not yet. I hope I get one of the first ones.

Does it look like it's on schedule?


Sony hasn't changed their schedule. I think that's the most important
thing. I thought it was a master stroke that they did.

Everyone criticized them for falling behind and having a high price and
costs as high as
$900. Why was it a master stroke?

PlayStation 2 was launched seven years ago in Japan at about $399. If
you use inflation, it's the same price, approximately. The important
thing is you cannot announce a game consoel for the next ten years and
not have Blu-Ray. It's an impossible scenario. I think they got that
perspective right. The moment we put those consoles together it's going
to be very clear. If I'm going to buy a next-generation game console,
I'm going to buy a console with next-generation media. It's going to
last 10 years.

Two out of three of the players have bet you don't need it. Nintendo
has bet you don't even need HD for the next five years.

Nintendo's perspective has always been different. The platforms that
are being built now are not just game consoles. You use it for all
kinds of other kinds of applications. In the case of Nintendo, they
wanted to build a game console. They built a wonderful game device.
Their focus is games and enjoyment. They will be myopically focused on
that. I think that is terrific. Their perspective is different from the
other two. If I'm going to buy a next-generation game console, I'm
going to want next-generation media.

Do you think Microsoft planned for a five-year cycle and that Sony
planned for a ten-year cycle?

I'm not sure how Microsoft is going to do in this transition. They are
clever and they will figure out a way. I'll make a prediction that Xbox
360 can't possibly be a DVD-only device by Christmas of next year.

They will modify it?

I don't know how they will do it. But I just can't imagine going to a
store and saying that this console has a Blu-Ray and this one has DVD.
Remember Dreamcast?

Do you think they will go further than the HD-DVD accessory that they
have planned?

I don't know how they will do that. Then they will have two platforms.
You have the Xbox 360 with DVD. That is what Xbox 360 will mean. If you
want to play HD, you have to buy an accesory? If that's the case, I'll
buy an HD player. I know Microsoft will come up with clever ideas.
These are the challenges. Every Xbox 360 they make in advance of that
decision makes that decision that much harder. You could have two Xbox
360s. It's a very tough strategic challenge. Sega had the same
strategic challenge when they launched ahead of Sony on PlayStation 2.
The executives at Sega are very smart and the Dreamcast was a very good
machine.

AirRaid wrote:
Nvidia CEO: An Extended Q&A
They will modify it?

I don't know how they will do it. But I just can't imagine going to a
store and saying that this console has a Blu-Ray and this one has DVD.
Remember Dreamcast?

I don't think the lack of DVD killed dreamcast, but even if it was a
factor, it's not the same scenario as today. The DVD format in the 360
is the current standard for most movies and games and is familiar and
accepted by customers. Blu-ray is still an unknown to a lot of people,
especially those without an HDTV which is 75 percent of consumers at
the moment.

Tom wrote:
AirRaid wrote:
Nvidia CEO: An Extended Q&A
They will modify it?

I don't know how they will do it. But I just can't imagine going to a
store and saying that this console has a Blu-Ray and this one has DVD.
Remember Dreamcast?

I don't think the lack of DVD killed dreamcast, but even if it was a
factor, it's not the same scenario as today. The DVD format in the 360
is the current standard for most movies and games and is familiar and
accepted by customers. Blu-ray is still an unknown to a lot of people,
especially those without an HDTV which is 75 percent of consumers at
the moment.


Right, DVD didn't launch with the PS2, it was on the market and
overtaking VHS for at least a couple of years prior (not to mention
demonstrably superior to VHS on standard TV sets). Blueray is a brand
new format with no market penetration basically debuting in the US with
the PS3. Couple that with the fact that only a small percentage of PS2
owners own or even hope to own an HDTV (which will be required to make
Blueray movies mean anything at all) and we have a totally different
scenario than in '99 with DVD playing game consoles.
I'd also like to add that this interview is utterly useless for any
game discussion. It says absolutely nothing concrete about the PS3
hardware or the comparison to the Xbox 360's video hardware. This might
as well be the OP cross-posting his view across multiple groups, because
there's just nothing worth repeating in this interview.

--
Scott

http://www.gamepilgrimage.com