Interesting sitdown with JHH. Everything from the early days of NV1 and 3dfx to NV30 and thoughts on the future.
http://tech.tbreak.com/2009/11/nvidia-past-present-future-an-interview-with-jen-hsun-huang/1/
http://tech.tbreak.com/2009/11/nvidia-past-present-future-an-interview-with-jen-hsun-huang/1/
NVIDIA was the first company in the world to have been founded with a singular purpose of creating consumer 3D graphics. About a year later 3DFX started and became an instant success because they made some really good decisions. Their architecture required low cost memory- they use a lot of memory whereas our architecture was very tolerant to high cost memory. When NVIDIA first started one Megabyte of DRAM was $50 and (3DFX) needed 4MB- that’s $200 in cost simply for memory. We could operate on just 1MB so the cost difference between our solutions was already $150 which was a big advantage for us. Then all of a sudden, memory prices collapsed and $50 became $5 and our $150 price advantage became $15. Their architecture was more elegant- it was easier to program and more compatible with OpenGL. They took off and we were flat on our back. We went from being almost successful to almost dead overnight. It became clear that we had the wrong architecture for the future where memory was going to be cheap.