David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…And just so that this doesn't feel arbitrary why are we talking about this, we're going to say at a super high level on 3D graphics here, rather than really going into the weeds. A triangle is the fewest vertices in a shape that you can have while still creating a two-dimensional shape. It serves as a basic building block, where, assuming you can draw enough triangles and make the triangle small enough, you can form any other shape, any other curved surface. It's the most fundamental building block that you could use to create something that is perceived as 3D. Yup. NVIDIA at this point, they're halfway down the road of developing the next chip that they think Sega is going to adopt for what ultimately would become the Dreamcast. NVIDIA was calling the NV2. When Sega comes back and says, we're switching horses, we're not going to do this, they're screwed. For so many reasons, everything we've discussed, there's also in the interim year-and-a-half since NVIDIA started, the price of memory dropped because, thank you, Moore's Law. NVIDIA's chips were designed to be super, super tight on memory. The memory cost about $200 in component parts to go into their chips. Their competitors have more memory that's costing them $50. That was just in that one iteration. It's interesting to note that NVIDIA, by being first and not projecting out the exponential change that would come from Moore's Law, was actually at a disadvantage. Because they didn't get a chance to watch and see where the standards were adopted, so they picked their own lane and went off in their own direction, which ended up not being what everyone else picked, which put them at a disadvantage. But second of all, everyone else's cost structure was way lower or at least everyone else could see that the cost structure was getting way lower. NVIDIA designed for a constraint that was no longer true by the time everyone else came out with their stuff. At this point, Jensen and his co-founders had to look at each other and say, okay, do we scrap everything we did? And if so, how do we not make this mistake again? How do we make sure that in future generations, we premeditate the exponential curve of Moore's Law and prices coming down and design for things that are two, three, four generations beyond what we actually have available to hardware right now?…

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