David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. The idea with ASICs is really, if you're not saying, hey, there's going to be a general-purpose computer that needs to power that can be super flexible and people might have all kinds of applications that run on it, but more inefficient in order to get that flexibility chip. Hey, I know the exact thing that this chip will do and it will only ever do this. We can actually literally hardcode that right on the chip. The actual design of the physical chip can be for this one specific thing, so it's super efficient at this one low level thing. Yup. The legacy of ASICs today, still around, still use both ASICs, but the legacy is FPGAs, Field Programmable Gate Array chips that some might say are sort of a bear case for NVIDIA these days. We will get to that far, far, far down the road. Sun Microsystems was one of their biggest customers. That’s how Sun got started and made the chips for their workstations. In fact, Jensen when he shows up at LSI, Sun is just starting and coming to LSI. He gets put on the project and he basically embeds with Sun in the early days of Sun Microsystems to help them build up the chips for what would ultimately become the SPARCstation 1, Sun's first big workstation product. Over the next few years, he pretty much exclusively works with Sun while he's at LSI logic. He works directly with Andy Becktolsheim who's the founder of Sun and with Vinod Khosla. He became super well-known, and developed quite a reputation as somebody who can really take these visions for chips and these customer requirements from Sun, and turn it into reality and production. One day, right around Thanksgiving in 1992, Jensen has finally, after eight years, finished his master's degree at Stanford. Stanford is quite, quite glad that he finished before this happened. Two of Jensen's buddies who he's become close with at Sun, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, who in Jensen's own words describes them as really, really fantastic engineers—when Jensen says that, he means it—they come to Jensen and they're like, we're not super happy at Sun, the two of us. We have an idea that we want to talk to you about. Jensen's like, well, sure. Let's go meet at my favorite spot, Denny's. Really?…

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