Inside ATI & NVIDIA: How they make frames fly

Lunch's on Jen-Hsun

It's rare that you see the CEO of a company the size of NVIDIA just walking around and interacting with the thousands of employees, but that's what we've come to expect from NVIDIA's Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang. We were eating at NVIDIA's cafeteria when Jen-Hsun walked by (of course cutting to the front of the line, one of the perks of being the CEO of NVIDIA) and offered to buy us lunch, apparently if you tell the cafeteria workers that Jen-Hsun is buying they just let you through - no questions asked.

Later on that day we managed to catch up with Jen-Hsun in his cubicle and talked to him for a bit:

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Just like many of today's Silicon Valley CEO's, Jen-Hsun works in a cubicle just like the rest of the employees at NVIDIA. We talked with Jen-Hsun a bit about the future of nForce2; he felt that with AMD's 2003 shipments being mostly Athlon XPs (supposedly around 60% Athlon XPs vs. 40% Hammers by Q4-03), nForce2 would have a good chance to succeed.

What does NVIDIA's CEO have laying around his cubicle? Other than the pictures of his family he had a handful of NVIDIA GPUs and cards:

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This Riva TNT card (above) is actually running a peltier cooler and was among Jen-Hsun's toys.

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What started it all, the NV1 from NVIDIA (above). This card, the Diamond Edge 3D retailed for $249 and came with 1MB of VRAM (you could get a whopping 2MB of VRAM as well). The card came bundled with Virtua Fighter Remix and it could run the game at 800x600 at around 30 fps.

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Both of these posters can provide a few laughs, and we'll end on the number one reason to invest in NVIDIA:

Final Words

We hope you enjoyed this continuation of our Inside series; we've got many more companies to take you behind the scenes of but until then be sure to check out our previous pieces on Inside Intel and VIA:

Inside Intel: From Silicon to the World
Inside VIA: Beneath the Hull of WenChi's Ship