An era that belonged to Huang Jen-hoon had not yet begun to come to an end.
On February 8, both Nvidia and SoftBank Group announced the termination of NVIDIA's acquisition of Arm. At this point, the largest acquisition in the chip industry, which lasted for more than a year, ended in failure.
Although Nvidia founder Huang Jenxun has said that "it is not necessary to acquire Arm", the acquisition of Arm is an important part of NVIDIA for all to see.
On September 14, 2020, Nvidia announced its intention to acquire Arm for $40 billion. Just two months before the acquisition, Nvidia's market capitalization approached $250 billion, surpassing Intel's $248 billion to become the largest chipmaker in the United States and the world's third-largest semiconductor company after Samsung and TSMC. At that time, the media reports began to declare: an era belonging to Huang Jenxun began.
One is the absolute hegemon in the GPU field, the other is the leader in the field of mobile chip architecture, once the acquisition is successful, it means that NVIDIA will master most of the world's mobile device core, not only smart phones, but also smart cars, smart homes and cloud computing and so on.
In the face of a series of chain reactions that will occur, a number of companies, including Qualcomm, Huawei, Samsung, Apple and Google, have stood up against the acquisition, and regulators in various countries have also begun to intervene. According to foreign media reports, the United Kingdom intervened in the transaction on the grounds of national security, and the US Federal Trade Commission also sued Nvidia to veto the acquisition of Arm.
And the termination of the acquisition now also means that Huang Jenxun, the most aggressive man in Silicon Valley, has not ushered in his new era after all.
Huang Jen-hoon
Since founding Nvidia in 1993, Huang Renxun has proposed Huang's Law, which is called Moore's Law, and has brought the company to a market value of nearly 700 billion US dollars, successfully selected as the 100 most influential people in Time magazine in 2021. In 2017, Fortune magazine selected him as the 2017 Businessman of the Year, juxtaposing it with Amazon founder Bezos and Tesla CEO Musk, and even some people thought that Huang Jenxun would be the next Jobs.
In 2007, when Jobs officially released the iPhone, Forbes magazine commented on Jen-Hsun Huang, "Since LinkedIn Weida went public in 1999, its stock price has soared 20 times." During the same period, even the mighty Apple could not match it. ”
Then, with a series of innovative products such as the iPhone, Jobs led Apple to gradually become the most high-tech company in the US stock market. At present, Huang Jenxun, who missed Arm and cannot control the chip jianghu with one HAND CPU and one HAND GPU, is becoming a little difficult to match Jobs's achievements.
A
Huang Jen-hoon, who is accustomed to wearing a leather motorcycle jacket, decided to tattoo his arm when his company's stock price reached $100, from a bad teenager to a billionaire, and the story of Huang Renxun was somewhat jianghu.
As a teenager, Huang Washun was a troubled student.
Huang Was born in Taiwan in 1964 to an engineer father and a teacher mother. At the age of 10, he and his brother were sent to their uncle's house in Washington State. But their uncle's family was also more difficult, so they were eventually placed in a rural boarding school.
According to Mr. Huang, the school was more like a concentration camp for troubled teenagers: Each child had a knife, and his classmates were tattooed all over the body. Here, Mr. Huang cleans the men's toilet every day after school, while his brother works on a tobacco farm. He also did many naughty things, such as climbing walls and trees, stealing food and even smoking cigarettes.
Two years later, Mr. Huang's parents came to the United States, and he also attended regular schools. For the previous years of study, Huang Jenxun once said with a smile, "This year and a half has taught me to be patient."
Later, bad boys use knowledge to change their fate. Jen-Hsun Huang was admitted to Oregon State University with a bachelor's degree in dual electronic engineering and a master's degree in double electronic engineering from Stanford University.
After graduating, Jen-Hsun Huang briefly worked at AMD, and in 1985 worked for a chip company, LSI Logic, for eight years, from engineering to general manager of sales.
In 1993, 30-year-old Jen-Hsun Huang co-founded NVIDIA with two other friends. According to Mr. Huang recalls, he didn't have a computer at the time, only an abacus that his father had given him that he might have bought in Chinatown, a phone call on his desk, and $200 in his pocket, but there were 250 competitors on the market, many of which were big companies, such as IBM, HP, Sony, Cisco, and so on.
Image source: Techsoho
In 1995, Nvidia introduced its first product, the NV1 graphics processor, but the 3D image did not catch on. Jen-Hsun Huang reworked Nvidia's strategy to focus on the field of desktop-based 3D graphics.
In the semiconductor industry at that time, the speed of technological development followed Moore's Law: every 18-24 months, the number of circuits on integrated circuit chips would double. This was proposed by Gordon Moore in 1965, when he had not yet founded Intel. And this important law in the computer industry, which ruled the chip industry for fifty years, declined in 2016. The academic journal Nature wrote at the time that the international semiconductor technology roadmap no longer targeted Moore's Law.
Huang believes NVIDIA can build its strengths by breaking Moore's Law. So in 1999, Huang Renxun proposed the "Huang's Law" in the field of graphics card chips, which was later called along with Moore's Law, that is, the performance of display chips doubled every 6 months. The product update speed is 3 times faster than Moore's Law, allowing NVIDIA to establish its mainstream position in the industry.
In August 1999, Huang Renxun first proposed the concept of GPU (graphics processing unit) with LinkedIn Vida launched the world's first display core named after GeForce. Since then, GPUs have become another important computing unit in a computer that is independent of the CPU.
In Huang's view, NVIDIA is not only a chip company, but also a company focused on the world's most complex and difficult visual computing problems, and producing chips is not the ultimate goal, why should it be produced. Just like he was able to propose the challenging "Huang's Law" in the first place.
In a speech at Tsinghua University, Huang said, "The biggest difference between us and other competitors is that we will see bigger pictures in a year or two, and we will go farther than they think, solving the biggest computational difficulties that have emerged in the world." ”
B
However, the chip road is not easy to walk. Just like when Huang Jenxun was going to enter the industry, he called an analyst for advice, and the analyst told him that the market had not yet started and was already a mess, and you had better not do this.
In the early days of its establishment, NVIDIA did encounter many setbacks. Because the first product launched, NV1, was not recognized by the market, the most difficult time, NVIDIA's funds were only enough to maintain 30 days of operation, Huang Jenxun had to dissuade the company's non-core employees, and the company's scale was reduced from more than 100 people to more than 30 people. To make matters worse, Nvidia missed the cooperation of Japanese game giant Sega because of its insistence on going it alone, and the NV2 chip also became a failure.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, Nvidia has also faced the threat of ATI, which is Nvidia's biggest rival at that time after 3dfx.
At that time, Microsoft found NVIDIA in order to enter the game console business, but because NVIDIA asked for too much, Microsoft turned to seek cooperation with ATI. At the same time, because the rise of Nvidia threatened Intel's position, Intel also decided to support ATI against Nvidia.
The pinch between the two giants has dealt a heavy blow to NVIDIA. It was also at this time that Huang Renxun took the initiative to negotiate with Microsoft, and in 2003, the two sides reached a settlement.
And around the label on Huang Jenxun,In addition to the entrepreneurial legendary experience, there are also a series of highly distinctive ridiculous titles: "Two Bombs Of The Founders", "Nuclear Weapons Maniac", "Omelette Maniac" and so on.
At the beginning of the 21st century, in the face of the gradual rise of ATI, NVIDIA hastily launched GTX480, GTX590 and other graphics cards. As a result, due to the higher power requirements of the GTX590 graphics card, the supporting high-end motherboard at that time could not carry the power required by the GTX590, resulting in multiple spontaneous combustion accidents in the GTX series, and even netizens live-streamed the omelette. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra graphics card has also earned the title of "vacuum cleaner" and "hair dryer" for its fan noise.
Image source: Bilibili video screenshot
Even in a military program, a host mistakenly said in a briefing on how to attack an aircraft carrier: a grenade carrying 690 tactical nuclear graphics cards can destroy an aircraft carrier battle group with only one shot. The host's slip of mouth was quoted by netizens to NVIDIA, many people called NVIDIA a "nuclear bomb factory", and Huang Renxun was also named by netizens as the "founder of two bombs" and "nuclear weapons demon".
C
In the twenty-nine years that Huang Jenxun has taken LinkedIn Weida, from the PC era to the mobile communication era, and then to the era of artificial intelligence and cloud computing big data, for NVIDIA, the arrival of artificial intelligence is a crucial development node.
2012 was an important turning point for NVIDIA and was also called a landmark year for the development of artificial intelligence by Huang Jenxun. In this year's ImageNet competition, Alex, the inventor of Alexnet, who achieved breakthrough results, used Nvidia's GPUs, proving that GPUs are suitable for many parallel computer neural networks, much faster than CPUs.
This phenomenon has attracted global attention. Ai-intelligence research around the world, including Google and Baidu, has turned to GPU deep learning, which in turn has led to Nvidia's chips once in short supply.
When selected as one of the 100 most influential people in Time in 2021, Time magazine commented on Jen-Hsun Huang: "Artificial intelligence is changing our world, enabling computers to accomplish things that once required human perception and judgment. In this matter, the hardware enterprise founded by Huang Jenxun created a prerequisite.
Huang Jenxun's acquisition of Arm is difficult not to think that the Wintel alliance established with Microsoft, which was promoted by Intel, once monopolized about 90% of the world's microcomputer chip and operating system market. On intel's journey from a small workshop to a "supercarrier", the Wintel alliance has played a role.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates once recalled Microsoft's friendship with Intel: "Microsoft and Intel worked together to develop faster processors. Before the 1980s, Apple was the hegemon of the personal computer industry. IBM began to use Intel's processors and Microsoft's operating system in the 1980s, thus replacing Apple as the boss of the personal computer industry, and Intel and Microsoft also became giants of the computer industry at this time. ”
If Huang Jenxun's acquisition of Arm is successful, with the help of NVIDIA's dominance in the GPU field, coupled with the dominance of the Arm architecture in the CPU field, the story of becoming the next Jobs in the chip field may be in front of us. And with the failed acquisition of Arm, it all became a thing of the past.
Resources:
"Huang Jenxun AI Godfather" Xie Zefeng
"Restoring a Real World" Huang Renxun lectured at Tsinghua University
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
Businessman of the Year 2017: The Leader of silicon valley's AI revolution
"The Legendary Life of NVIDIA CEO Huang Jen-hoon: 16-year-old toilet sweep in the United States, 50-year-old net worth $3 billion" Silicon rabbit race
"Foreign media: Qualcomm, Microsoft and Google worry that Nvidia's acquisition of Arm will hurt competition" Sina News