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Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia at Nvision 08: Visual computing era is now

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:August 28, 2008

Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia, world’s largest maker of dedicated graphics chips kicked off Nvidia’s Nvision 08 event by touting the performance of the GPU – and the company’s CUDA technology, which allows programmers and developers to tap into the parallel processing ability of the company’s GPUs when writing software – compared to a CPU for use in visual computing.

During his keynote speech, Huang cited Stanford University’s Folding@home distributed computing application, pointing out that the Nvidia GPU deliver over 1.25 petaflops, or 42% of the total processing power of the application – which seeks to understand how proteins affect the human body. According to Nvidia, nearly half of the processing power on Folding@home is delivered by just 11,370 Nvidia GPUs. In comparison, 208,268 CPUs running Windows were active on the project, yet contributed only 198 teraflops – just 6% of the total processing power in the project.

Huang believes more science computing applications will start adopt GPUs, gradually replacing CPUs in the future. “Comparing Atom and Tegra is a little bit like comparing something with a V12, 1,000 horsepower to a hybrid.” Huang says. “What the world wants from us in the mobile device space is something like a hybrid.”

That comes out as I ask Huang about the differences between Intel and Nvidia’s chips for iPhone-like devices. As Intel explained to me last week, with its Atom chips it decided to abandon the low-wattage ARM platform that’s popular in phones today, wagering instead that over time engineers could build a low-wattage version of Intel’s powerful PC chips that would work in phones. Nvidia has made the opposite bet, basing its Tegra mobile chips on ARM.

In additional to Folding@home project, Huang noted the strong performance of GPUs in other visual applications, including automotive design and styling, massively multiplayer online (MMO) games and touch user interface technology. Huang added that Nvidia is expanding its GPU ecosystem, which will lead to a brand new generation of virtual computing.

Meanwhile at the conference, a few developers also showed what they’re doing with Nvidia’s CUDA programming environment. CUDA lets software tap into the power of graphics chips for tasks that traditionally have been left to Intel’s microprocessors – at times yielding eye-popping results.

t its first ever visual computing summit that ended here on Wednesday, the leader in this particular computing niche, put on display (no pun intended!) the breadth and reach of the digital graphics and visual medium – by letting its partners speak on its behalf:

The French Dassault Systems showcased its frontline 3-D product design tools for the aviation and auto industry including 3DVia a community Web resource opened to lay users and designers.

Microsoft, unveiled for the first time a new tool called PhotoSynth, which takes multiple still images of an object or scene, submitted by a user and stitches them together into a three dimensional panorama.

Mr Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel, a key figure in the development of the touch screen, demonstrated futuristic technology where “the mouse is an impediment to creativity with a computer” and where gestures with one finger control all functions.

Its bread and butter coming from ‘gaming’ freaks, the conference has been a mind boggling showcase of XTreme gaming. Hardcore practitioners competed round the clock, using machines fuelled by nVidia’s fastest products such as the GTX 280 graphics cards, pouring liquid oxygen on to the circuit boards to cool them and squeeze every additional megahertz of clock speed over the rated value.

Jen-Hsun Huang
nvidia
Co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer

Jen-Hsun Huang co-founded NVIDIA Corporation in April 1993 and has served as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board of Directors since its inception. Under his leadership, NVIDIA has become the world leader in programmable graphics processing technologies and one of the semiconductor industry’s largest fabless companies. Mr. Huang serves on the RAND Corporation’s Board of Trustees and is a member of the Committee of 100, an organization that addresses issues concerning the Chinese-American community and U.S.-China relations.

In 2004, the Fabless Semiconductor Association honored Mr. Huang with the prestigious Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award, which recognizes a leader who has made exceptional contributions to driving the development, innovation, growth, and long-term opportunities of the fabless semiconductor industry. Additionally, Mr. Huang is a recipient of the Daniel J. Epstein Engineering Management Award from the University of Southern California and was named an Alumni Fellow by Oregon State University. Prior to founding NVIDIA, Mr. Huang held engineering, marketing, and general management positions at LSI Logic, and was a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices. Mr. Huang holds a B.S.E.E. degree from Oregon State University and an M.S.E.E. degree from Stanford University.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce® products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro® products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, California and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit www.nvidia.com.

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