The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology

Summary

Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling the genius of Jensen Huang, Tae Kim's The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the making of a tech giant, and Steven Witt's The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip. For the later 90% of the history I wasn't there, so I won't comment on their treatment of that part. But for the pre-history at Sun Microsystems and the first 10% of the history I was there. Kim's account of the business side of this era is detailed and, although it was three decades ago, matches my recollections. Witt's account of the business side of the early history is much less detailed and some of the details don't match what I remember. But as regards the technical aspects of this early history it appears that neither author really understood the reasons for the two kinds of innovation we made; the imaging model and the I/O architecture. Witt writes (Page 31): The first time I asked Priem about the architecture of the NV1, he spoke uninterrupted for twenty-seven minutes. Below the fold, I try to explain what Curtis was talking about for those 27 minutes. It will take me quite a long post. Background In the "Three Decades" section of Engineering For The Long Term I wrote: The opportunity we saw when we started Nvidia was that the PC was transitioning from the PC/AT bus to version 1 of the PCI bus. The PC/AT bus' bandwidth was completely inadequate for 3D games, but the PCI bus had considerably more. Whether it was enough was an open question. We clearly needed to make the best possible use of the limited bandwidth we could get. We had two basic ways of making "the best possible use of the limited bandwidth": Reduce the amount of data we needed to ship across the bus for a given image. Increase the amount of data shipped in each cycle of the bus. Imaging Model A triangle is the simplest possible description of a surface. Thus almost the ...