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Mohammed Yousuf

Jen-Hsun Huang

Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of NVIDIA, is into making visual computing technologies. Even as he is busy rolling out 3D Vision, Tegra and cloud computing technologies, he traces the evolution of technology over the years.

Prior to founding NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun held engineering, marketing, and general management positions at LSI Logic, and was a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices.

In an interaction with eWorld, he relates how the market place is transforming and where it is headed.

Dotcom analogy

While economists and analysts are busy assessing the impact of the recession and forecasting the revival, Jen-Hsun sees a changing market place that ensures meeting the digital needs of the people at affordable cost points.

He likens the situation with that of the burst of the Internet bubble 10 years ago. “When the Internet was on the rise, new companies were created.

When the bubble burst, a good number of the then top companies that mattered most went out of sight. They didn't come back. The crisis changed the market place. And, led to the emergence of new firms,” he reminded.

Citing companies that lost sheen in that crisis, he draws a parallel to bring home the message that the recession is recreating a new market place.

“It (the market place) is changing again after the recession. People are talking of smart phones and netbooks. No one talks about personal computers now. You still have a need. But you cannot afford it. This forces you to look at the world differently. You have to be more clever than before. It is a new market,” he points out.

Jen-Hsun was in Hyderabad recently to interact with children at a Government school in Film Nagar.

Jen-Hsun, who loves to interact with students, opened NVIDIA Visual Computing Lab at Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) to give students access to latest equipment and software licence to work on GPU (graphics processing unit) engineering and visual computing.

A long way from the booth

He talks passionately about technological innovations and fondly remembers how his parents would interact with him from a tiny village in Thailand to the US, where he had just moved to a few decades ago.

“They would walk to a phone booth, book their slot and then try connecting with me in the US. From there, we have reached here with smart digital devices,” he says.

Driving home the message that the need is always there, he says people now rely on the Internet for 99 per cent of all computing needs.

“Perhaps, it may be lesser now. But in a few years, you can find all your computing needs on the cloud,” he said.

This, he argues, is the prime attribute of a changed market place that is sharply different from the one before the recession.

“As a result of the new need, the PC market is now witnessing flat growth rates, while the growth rates of netbooks are going up significantly,” he says.

Focus on tegra

With technological innovations giving us smaller processors and other components, the size of the digital devices will turn smaller and more compact, going forward.

Stating that Tegra is one such device to meet the growing demand for smart digital devices, he says the computer-on-a-chip will give manufacturers different ideas to design newer products.

Jen-Hsun, who spoke about the cheaper supercomputing model (Tesla Personal Computer) when he visited IIIT last year, now speaks of Tegra that could bring high performance computing.

“We could reduce the size of the processor that fit even in a mobile phone,” he adds.

NVIDIA is working with OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to popularise Tegra. Jen-Hsun says the market place will evolve further as the demand for still smaller devices grows as the world moves to 3G, wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi)-enabled places and the advent of 4G.

kurmanath@thehindu.co.in

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