A conversation with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO Nvidia

A conversation with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO Nvidia

CHARLIE ROSE: Jen-Hsun Huang is here. He is president, CEO and co-
founder of Nvidia, the world’s largest producer of graphic chips. But
Nvidia is a lot more than powering high-end video games for PC’s. Visual
computing is revolutionizing many aspects of our lives, from smart phones
and handheld computers to medical scanning equipment, energy exploration.
Jen-Hsun Huang has been on the frontier of this process. I am pleased to
have him here at this table for the first time. Welcome.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Thank you, Charlie.

CHARLIE ROSE: What is it that you and your company contribute to the
world that all of us interface with, computers, phones, medical graphics?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Well, we invented a product called GPU, the graphics
processing unit, and this technology, along with all the software that we
produce for it, makes it possible for you to see information, see the world
in a way, through the computer, that was not possible. And so we could
create imaginary worlds for you to be a part of. We could make it possible
for you to, you know, go to a different country and surf the world through
Google Earth, and we can help you see objects in a way that wasn’t possible
before.

CHARLIE ROSE: Take Google Earth, which lots of people know about.
How do you figure in? How does your processor connect to that?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: And so what they do is there is a database of height
maps and database of textures of different countries and different lands
and different spaces. And this is all part of a database that’s at Google.

What our technology does is take all of those images and three-
dimensional data and render it through the computer screen so that what the
user sees looks like a 3-D image of the world. And so we take a bunch of
numbers and a ton of data, terabytes and terabytes of data, and we make it
-- make you imagine you are seeing the world.

CHARLIE ROSE: Take us to where you are and what you are doing today,
you know, and where you might be 10 years from now. Where is this sort of
the excitement?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Well, if you take a look at what the GPU has really
done for the computer today, the breadth of applications is really, really
astounding. You know, people see us as one of the -- as the guys that
bring the technology of video games to you, and the reason for that is
because the video game market, which 15 years ago I postulated was going to
be a killer app, and 15 years ago when I started Nvidia the video game
market was approximately zero. It was a little tiny company -- a little
tiny industry, and Electronic Arts was a little tiny start-up, and now
today it’s one of the largest global entertainment industries.

And so people associate us with video games. And that is fabulous,
you know. We are bringing these virtual words to people, and we create
these -- this alternative universe that people can imagine, and it’s
wonderful and it’s exciting.

But we have a whole different part of our business, where visual
computing and the GPU has enabled all kinds of capabilities, whether it’s
in the discovery of energy -- the amount of seismic information that comes
out of the earth and the difficulty of finding those oil reserves has
become so difficult that you really need to be able to render that image in
a massive, massive screen. I mean, these are the world’s largest power
walls. And they are, you know, many, many megabytes of pixels that are on
the screen, and the amount of data behind it is just hundreds of gigabytes,
and a scientist needs to go find that oil reserve. It could be a doctor
who has taken these CT scan data and is looking for cancer, a tumor, and is
surfing through your human body so that they can find a tumor a little bit
more carefully, more precisely.

And so whether it is -- or even the next generation Audi that is
coming out where our GPU is making it better for you to navigate. And the
instrumentation is going to be powered by our GPUs to the F-22 Raptor.
There are six of them inside the most modern pilot system so that the pilot
could...

CHARLIE ROSE: On fighter planes.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: ... see the enemy a lot more quickly and clearly.
And so whether it is from changing lives to saving lives, our chips are in
those industries.

CHARLIE ROSE: Are these things that you and your company are creating
for these people, in other words, do you see the need, and so, therefore,
in an entrepreneurial and a creative way you make the product, or do people
in need come to you and say, is it possible to do this with your GPU? Or
can you imagine a GPU that could solve this problem for me?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Well, you know, that is a good question, and it is a
little bit of both. If you ask me what I do for a living...

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Ultimately, ultimately what we do is we solve some of
the greatest challenges of computing in the world. And so we know what our
tool is, and we know what our expertise is, and we try to put ourselves in
situations where people who have extraordinary challenges -- it could be --
one of my favorite stories is a couple of doctors at Mass General, and they
would like to use the GPU in a very specific way. And they had this --
they learned about the GPU and they thought, wouldn’t it be great if we
used the computational capability of the GPU to reconstruct CT scan data in
real time so that they could do a mammogram in real time before the patient
goes home? And truly discover whether that person has cancer or not, right
there, OK?

And one of the challenges that they have is the amount of data they
sort through is so great that there are just a lot of false detections, and
it scares the patient, obviously. And so if you had just -- if you could
render the woman’s breasts in three-dimensional volumetric precision, you
could actually go through it layer by layer, and almost any novice can
detect whether there is breast cancer or not.

And so, the computational capability was really vast, and they didn’t
think that it was possible unless they were to use this new device called
the GPU. And so they came to us and they said, you know, look, we would
like to do this thing. The outcome of this project is likely either a
paper or we will buy a few GPUs. And so, you know, we manufacture about
100 million a year, and here is a couple of doctors who would like to buy
two or three, when they are all said and done, and the project would take
about a year and a half or so.

We love those kind of opportunities, because it really takes us into
spaces that we have never been to before. As a result of that, they
published a paper, it became a huge craze in medical imaging, and now we
are engaged with every medical imaging company in the world. It took us to
places that we just simply didn’t know.

The same capability in imaging could be used for Adobe’s Photoshop
now, so that you could do things in digital photography that is now
becoming a field called computational photography. Really exciting.

CHARLIE ROSE: And how much of your business today is still in gaming?
Or games?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Well, I would say that -- I would say that -- you
know, call it 20 percent of our business, maybe 30 percent of our business
goes towards people who are hard-core gamers. And they just, you know,
this is what they live and breathe. And they always want the latest
generation technology. They want to always have the best gear. In that
business, we are a little bit like Nike. We are the gear of choice of
cyber athletes. They are playing games just like people who are playing
basketball and football, and so I think they see us kind of like a Nike.

In the case of these doctors and scientists and engineers, you know,
we are probably like Silicon Graphics to them used to be, you know, we are
the company that provides...

CHARLIE ROSE: Sort of the initial graphics company.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: ... the technology -- that’s right. The famous
graphics company in Silicon Valley that really brought 3-D graphics to
mainstream, because of the work that they did with “Jurassic Park” and
“Terminator.” And many of those engineers now work at Nvidia, and the work
is very important.

CHARLIE ROSE: A bit of biography before, because you had a very
interesting life. You are how old now?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: I’m 45.

CHARLIE ROSE: You are 45 now. You started the company when you were?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: 30.

CHARLIE ROSE: 30.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: Before that, I mean, you kind of bounced around several
states. Tell me the story. And had a learning experience that serves you
well.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Well, we were in Thailand. I was just about almost
10 years old, and recently Thailand had a coup.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Well, in 1973, they had a coup. And I think it was
1973, ‘75, or something like that, and my parents thought that it was
unsafe for us to be there. And so my parents put my older brother and me
on a plane, sent us to -- sent us to Tacoma, Washington, where my uncle
was. From there, they put us in a private school, a boarding school, and
the one that they selected -- I am not exactly sure why -- but my parent
didn’t know the United States very well and probably didn’t know that
Kentucky was very far away.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: From Washington.

CHARLIE ROSE: So they sent you to school in Kentucky.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: So we ended up in a small town in Kentucky called
Oneida.

The Web site is still up. It’s the Oneida Baptist Institute.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: And so my older brother and me went to Oneida Baptist
Institute for about a year and a half or so, and it was a fabulous
experience. We were the only two Chinese kids that had been there. And
this was during a time when the United States was still rather learning
about foreigners. And so everybody asked me whether I knew kung fu, and
because of Bruce Lee, and obviously I didn’t. But I was very good at math,
and so all of the local kids took to me because I could help them with
homework and things like that. And it was a small school.

My job during the afternoons -- after you go to school, everybody has
a task. My job would be to clean all of the bathrooms of the dorm. There
was a dorm of about 300 kids. And my older brother’s job -- he was one
year older than me, so he was 11 years old -- his job was to work in the
tobacco farm. And so we would do this until my parents came, and then we
flew back to Washington, where we met up with them.

But it was -- you know, people say, you know, Jen-Hsun, you went to a
school, and it turned out that school -- I am not even too sure how they
positioned the school and why we went to it, but it was a boarding school
for international students somehow. It’s also a reform school. And so,
you know, I don’t know how they got into that business, but it turned out
there were a lot of challenging, you know, very, very difficult and very
tough kids. My roommate was 17 years old, and I still remember that when
he -- when we were getting ready for bed that night, you know, he took off
his shirt and he had stab wounds all over his body. And so this is -- it
turned out to be a wonderful kid. Didn’t know how to read, but turned out
to be a wonderful kid. And I learned a lot in that school.

CHARLIE ROSE: What brought you to technology?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: You know, I was in a high school in Oregon, and I was
very good in math and I was very good in science, and I always felt that I
was going to be an engineer. And one of my best friends in high school,
you know, the small group of us were exposed to the Apple II, and a
terminal that hooked us up with a mainframe. And so we played a lot of
games and we learned a lot of programs, and we were exposed to the computer
early on and so...

CHARLIE ROSE: This is a similar experience to Bill Gates.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Yes, in fact, I will argue that -- that’s right, and
when he tells that story, it really resonates with me.

CHARLIE ROSE: That there was a machine in his school.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Exactly.

CHARLIE ROSE: Put there by his mother.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Exactly.

CHARLIE ROSE: And he will argue to you, as you know, that that is
what turned him on, and it’s because of all those hours and he became, as
he said, I mean, he said I was just a maniac about this.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: In a recent interview.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Yes, yes. And I fell in love with it myself. You
know, video games was a big part of probably the reason why he initially --
but there’s -- in our case, the mainframe had a video game called “Star
Trek” on it, and we could play “Star Trek” in basically a virtual world
battleship. You make a move, they make a move. And we would play this
across the network, you know -- well, it wasn’t a network, it was a
mainframe, the cloud computing of that day -- and we would play against all
these other kids, probably. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Bill was on the
other side playing.

CHARLIE ROSE: You created Nvidia when?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: 1993.

CHARLIE ROSE: And it went public in 1999.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Right. We, in fact, you know, I -- somebody told me
that this month was actually our 10th anniversary, and so -- of being
public.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: So.

CHARLIE ROSE: And so January to January?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE: You created the company believing you could provide
what? Serve what market?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: To be honest, we -- you know, it’s like I think all
of these startups, you have an intuition. The intuition is that 3-D
graphics, if made in extremely high volumes, could do as a medium what
video could have done, what audio did, except, you know, this particular
medium is fundamentally interactive. It is different every time, very
different than video. Every time you watch it, it’s the same. This is a
medium that you can share. If you look at one of the world’s largest
virtual worlds, the World of Warcraft, hundreds of thousands of people are
inside, enjoying that one application, that one instantiation at the same
time. And they are hooking up, they are, hey, let’s get online and at 7:00
o’clock, let’s get a clan going, we’ll go attack that castle together.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: So that is the ultimate virtual experience, the
ultimate social -- online social experience.

So we imagined these type of capabilities when we started the company.
We made it a high enough volume video games, the way people communicated,
the way people learned and explored would change. And so we imagined all
of the things that we are experiencing today then.

But how we could get here -- that is something you just kind of, you
know, explored along the way. We kind of felt our way here.

CHARLIE ROSE: You have also attracted the attention of Intel. Where
is this competition today and where is it going? They make microprocessors
and they do a lot of other things, but they are, you know, Wintel was a
product of Microsoft and Intel, Windows and Intel.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: There is a lot of -- there is a lot of -- there is
this tension between us and Intel that is discussed today. And I think
that -- I think at the core of it, if you will, is the battle for the soul
of the PC. And I -- and let me -- you know, if you look at the PC, the PC
was created as an electronic and technological, a general purpose version
of the typewriter and the calculator. And notice the two killer apps that
got us here was Word and Excel.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: OK? One is a calculator and one is a typewriter.
And so that the architecture of the personal computer is based around a
processor called the CPU, which is optimized for -- designed for text
characters, numbers, and number crunching. And then all of a sudden, the
personal computer -- and knowing that the vast majority of the world’s
people don’t need to just write or calculate, and that the computer has
made it possible for us to experience things, to go places, virtual places,
to go to -- to go to virtual worlds, to go to environments that you share
with your friends, to experience things that aren’t real, that are
wonderful and imaginative.

The computer has become all of a sudden today a medium for artistic
expression. And so, where we started and where we are today is very
different. And along the way, what happened was and what made this
possible, this virtual world capability, this experiencing the world
capability, virtual worlds, imaginations and artistic expression, what
makes it possible is this processor we invented called the GPU.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: And so now there is this tension between which one is
more important. We believe that the GPU is going to become more and more
important than ever, and, instead of just manipulating text and numbers,
the world is going to want to manipulate images and 3-D worlds.

CHARLIE ROSE: And what do you think Intel believes?

JEN-HSUN HUANG: I think that they clearly believe that the GPU is
becoming more important...

CHARLIE ROSE: Of course.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: ... because one of the things that they are doing is
investing -- and they talk about it greatly -- about the processor that
they are building to be a GPU, called Larrabee.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: And so...

CHARLIE ROSE: They want to take you on.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: They want to take us on. And so I think there is a
good reason for that, and the perfect metaphor, you know...

CHARLIE ROSE: These are things you brought with us to show me.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: Yes. Let me show you one of my favorite things, and
this is a full computer.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: This computer here runs Windows Vista. All you have
to do is add memory, and you are done. OK, this little tiny computer.
There are two chips on here, there’s two processors. One of them is the
CPU and one of them is the GPU.

CHARLIE ROSE: So point them out.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: So here is the CPU. This is the atom processor. It
is my favorite processor in the world. It is the fastest selling processor
even through this rescission. It’s tiny. It’s low power. It is enough
performance to run almost anything you want, if you coupled it with a GPU.
And so here’s the GPU.

Steve Jobs recently when he announced the Mac Book that we’re in and
Mac Pro, he described this as an amazing chip.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

JEN-HSUN HUANG: And he spent all this time talking about this chip.
And so this processor, this GPU here has 16 GPU processors inside, and 54
gigaflops -- to put that in perspective, that’s like -- that’s like -- this
is -- what is that? A -- 54 times faster than the fastest supercomputer