Nvidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang Talks About Windows ARM, Tegra, and the Cost of R&D at AsiaD

Posted 10/23/2011 at 11:45am | by Justin Kerr

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NVidia’s founder and president Jen-Hsun Huang was on hand at this years AsiaD conference, and as usual, he put on quite the show. In addition to reconfirming the companies future plans for the Tegra platform, he offered up sage advice for Microsoft on how to manage Intel during the transition to ARM, how much his company is spending on R&D, and even openly fantasized about getting his chips in future versions of the iPad. 

When asked about his feelings towards Windows on ARM, Huang was quite specific, don’t call it a PC.

"It's important for [Microsoft] not to position these as PCs. From a finesse perspective -- I can't speak on their behalf -- but I would come out with tablets first with Windows on ARM. It helps to establish that this isn't a PC. Will yesterday's Office run on tomorrow's Windows on ARM PC? Will a new version of Office run on tomorrow's Windows on ARM tablets? Both questions are about legacy, and both are about Office. The actual implementation of it is radically different. I see no reason to make Office 95 to run on Windows on ARM. I think it would be wonderful, absolutely wonderful -- I'd say, as someone who uses Windows -- it would be almost a requirement to me that [the ARM] device runs Windows interoperably. If Office runs on Windows on ARM -- it's the killer app. Everything else is on the web."

On the topic of Tegra, Huang explained that Nvidia has been literally transformed by its work in this area, and now finds itself in direct competition with Qualcomm. Development has been expensive, and he estimates they have already spent well in excess of $2 billion on R&D. 

"In order to build these system-on-chips, we need 500 chip designers and 1,000 software engineers to bring them to market. Two or three years each, so not exactly economic to build 'em for just the tablet, but some versions are perfect for tablets, some for high-end smartphones, somewhere between two segments. A long time ago there was only one CPU shipping at the time, and that was from Intel; and now there are many. We started out with the smartphone, but it's going to explode to all kinds of mobile devices. We also have the car market, the ultimate mobile processor."

“The cost for developing such a chip is likely to go up over time, Huang said, and is driven by an approach to come up with "something magical" and "unexpected" in every product generation. For example, while Kal-El will be moving to four cores, with one additional supporting core, the cores in the succeeding product generation will offer more performance and there will be a feature that catches Nvidia's rivals "off-guard", the executive said.”

As for the iPad? “It would be a great delight to have Nvidia's tablet chip in an iPad”, Huang confirmed. NVidia already powers approximately 70 percent of all non-iPad’s sold in the market today, so convincing Apple to outsource on chip development would be a huge win.