Beyond the show — Nvidia · Jensen Huang · 2006

You can make every graphics card you sell a general-purpose computer, and pay for it out of the margin on games. Do you?

Nvidia sells graphics cards to gamers. Revenue is around $3 billion, growing, and the business is a two-horse race with ATI, which AMD has just bought for $5.4 billion. Intel is rumoured to be building its own graphics chip. A Stanford researcher you hired two years ago has shown that a graphics processor, tricked with the right code, can run scientific calculations far faster than a general-purpose processor — but only through a programming interface designed for drawing triangles. Your next architecture, G80, is nearly finished. Making it run general-purpose code properly means adding circuitry to every chip: die area gamers will not use, cost they will not pay for, and a hit to gross margin in the one business you have. The market for scientific and financial computing on graphics chips is, at this point, a few hundred academics.

Choose before you scroll. The answer is hidden until you commit.