We are bringing you the second part of our interview with Jen Hsung Huang, CEO of Nvidia. In this part we covered some about important issues, such as the future of games with ray tracing and rasterization in mind, Larrabee, overall about Intel’s path to graphics and  the famous Inquirer article that Sylvie wrote about Derek Perez, Nvidia’s director of public relations that you can read here. Here is what Jensen had to say on these things. The first part is here.

4. What do you think about ray tracing or rasterizing as the future of games?


Jensen: NVIDIA is the world leader of ray tracing solutions. Mental Images is the clear market leader of ray tracing renderers. And recently, we added to our capabilities with the RayScale team. At Siggraph, we demonstrated the world’s first real-time ray tracer running on CUDA.

The future is clearly hybrid – rasterizing, programmable shading, computed images, and many other techniques will be used. We’ve left hardwired pipelining in the past. “Graphics Emulation” is pointlessly inefficient. Hybrid is best. There are many ways to create beautiful images. As the world leader of visual computing, we have to offer whatever it takes to advance the state of computer graphics.
 

5. How does NVIDIA see Intel’s Larrabee? What are the challenges?


Jensen: Intel must be recognizing the growing importance of the GPU. They clearly see that the GPU and visual computing is an important growth market. They must have also recognized that the GPU will be used for parallel computing. The many-core architecture of the GPU is crucial to the future of computing. We are delighted they agree.

That said, there are lots of questions that we are looking forward to seeing answers to from Intel. For example:

Why is x86 desirable if Larrabee is not binary compatible with volume PC applications? Isn’t binary compatibility the most important attribute of x86?

Why is x86 a good instruction set for “graphics emulation?”

Emulation is simply inefficient. And graphics is the most computer intensive application we know. This is the green era, the era of efficiency. Why wouldn’t Intel focus on extreme power efficiency like their CPUs?

Emulation depends heavily on software. If it was so easy, why doesn’t Intel focus this expertise to fix the countless incompatibilities of their current integrated graphics? After all, it’s just software, right?

There are so many questions and yet so few answers. Until Larrabee becomes something more than just a PowerPoint presentation, we will have to reserve judgment.

At the end of the day, NVIDIA and Intel will together create the parallel computing processor market. This is important work to take the PC to the next level. The industry will be well served with both of us contributing. 

6. How did you make the difficult decision to go frontally against Intel?


Jensen: We really didn’t make a decision like that. We are evolving and building the GPU market. And we’re super excited about the increasingly important role of the GPU. We are thrilled that Intel recognizes how important our space is.

 
7. What was your take on the Inquirer article relating to Derek and your NVISION keynote?


Jensen: First, it was unprofessional for the reporter to look over his shoulder and read private notes between him and other NVIDIA staff. I respect that the press has the right to publish anything they think will generate clicks, but there should be some ethical boundaries.

Second, the Inquirer article didn’t accurately report Derek’s true assessment of the keynote. Some of the things attributed to Derek in the article were his opinions, both positive and negative, but others were the opinions of editors and press that Derek was conveying to me. Many of the negative comments were from hard-core technical press who were disappointed that NVIDIA didn’t do big product announcements. But this was not the goal of NVISION. The goal of the show wasn’t to showcase NVIDIA, but rather to introduce the visual computing industry and serve as a platform for the companies of the visual computing ecosystem and to showcase the industry’s amazing reach and the great contributions it is making to the world.

That said, I believe all NVIDIA employees have the right and responsibility to express themselves. We have a culture that prides itself on being direct with our opinions. And we have a culture of objectivity, intellectual honesty, and calling it the way it is. So no matter how Derek felt about it. I support his right to openly express it. We’ll take his comments, both positive and negative, along with the comments from everyone else, and use them to create an even better conference next year.

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