> "His answer: 'Not at all. Intel should be afraid of us. We will be bigger than them.' There was not a trace of doubt."
Given all the times that HN readers have derided grandiose executive pronouncements preceding flops, more people should recognize the above for what it is: not profundity but just puffery that happened to pan out. Not that skill and effort weren't involved in making it pan out but that any of a zillion things could have gone wrong to make that statement false and part of any manager's job is to project confidence and instill motivation despite knowing that.
I think he had a strategy - utilizing the massively parallel computation of GPUs for more general purpose compute as Moore's law tailed off - and he noticed that Intel couldn't see the lights of this in the rear view mirror.
Everybody's known that Moore's law was on its way out, for speed increases at least, since the mid 2000s - the seminal article was by Herb Sutter [1]. So hardware needed to get more parallel. But multicore is a distinctly different paradigm to CUDA, which is closer to SIMD but on a completely different order of magnitude. So Intel was never going to get to where the puck was skating.
That’s the point, though. This is no different than any other statement made by a CEO with good engineers behind them.
This time it worked out. Can’t give it a survivorship bias. I don’t personally mind CEOs being encouraging, but at least understand that they don’t really ever know.
IMO one big factor is that Nvidia is still fully engineering driven - it's engineers all the way to the top making the calls. Intel was like that as well, and then lost it (until Gelsinger). IMO you need domain experts in charge of companies, or they can't thrive in the long run, not unless there is an actual, almost unsurpassable moat.
It's called leadership. George Washington wasn't a brilliant general but he was able to convince people they were going to win against an empire. Whether he actually believed it himself we'll never know.
Given all the times that HN readers have derided grandiose executive pronouncements preceding flops, more people should recognize the above for what it is: not profundity but just puffery that happened to pan out. Not that skill and effort weren't involved in making it pan out but that any of a zillion things could have gone wrong to make that statement false and part of any manager's job is to project confidence and instill motivation despite knowing that.