Mythbusters, NVIDIA and Growth

For the grand finale at NVISION 08, NVIDIA brought in the Mythbusters. They were looking to demonstrate how a GPU (graphics processing unit) differs from a CPU (central processing unit) in a way that the average person-on-the-street could understand. This is important to NVIDIA because they've come to dominate the stand-alone GPU business, and still need to grow. To do that, they'll need to have both the industry, and end-users come to appreciate how the GPU can do more than just graphics.

First the Mythbusters demo (you can see all of my pictures on my photo-sharing website pqphotography by clicking here). They started with a small remote control robot that represented the CPU because it did one-thing at a time -- namely, shot paint balls at a piece of paper to paint a smiley face. The crowd of industry analysts, gamers and developers loved it, and welcomed Jaime and Adam to the stage like heroes. It was kind of cool and generated applause. Then, it was time for the GPU demo, which involved pulling the curtain back and unveiling a suitably more impressive machine. Naturally, it does more in parallel -- Using 1,100 paint-ball guns to paint the Mona Lisa in a fraction of a second. It was very impressive. If you want to see a youtube video (hopefully still posted), click here.

So, other than having pulled off and entertaining, engaging, trade-show with clear messages, what did this all say about the evolving graphics market, and NVIDIA in particular? As for graphics, I think it's clear that the industry is following an "if you build it, they will come" strategy, and the developers and artists are coming. It's hard to imagine all of the things that will be done with graphics in the next 5 to 10 years, but it's easy to imagine that many of them will be compelling and easily appreciated by large segments of the population.

As for NVIDIA, they're at an interesting point in their development as a company. Many a company experiences success in one domain, only to struggle extending that success beyond their initial niche. They've had an amazing run when you think that they are the only sizable dedicated PC graphics company still standing, and they're doing very well against the likes of Intel and AMD who each develop and offer their own graphics engines. But continuing to grow at a rate that will satisfy investors will require much more than maintaining share of the PC graphics business, so the bets they are placing are on mobile, embedded, and compute applications of GPUs. I like these bets because they are all adjacencies and logical extensions of their core capabilities. For mobile, it seems reasonable that we will want richer interfaces on our iPhones and Smartphones. For embedded, why not have richer interfaces and displays for our cars -- after all, a 3D representation of the map would be a lot closer to what I see out the window of the car. Probably the toughest challenge is in compute. Sure, there are interesting difficult problems that will quickly appreciate the value of NVIDIA's CUDA that turns their GPUs into massively parallel compute engines, but it's hard to imagine that this won't be fiercely fought for by existing CPU companies when the market broadens. That's not to say that NVIDIA will fail, just that this is less of an adjacency, and will be a harder win. On the whole though, yes, NVIDIA came off looking like a company making good calculated bets on the future, while continuing to lead in their core business. I look forward to seeing where they are at NVISION 09.