As Leslie Berlin details in her well-researched book The Man Behind the Microchip, they didn’t know which path would merit the big bet, so they had to explore all three. The team led by Andy Grove and Les Vadasz pursued memory chips built with a MOS (metal-oxide-silicon) technique. Their second chip based on this technology, the 1103, gave Intel a breakthrough: the first semiconductor memory that could compete on price with traditional core memories. Following this, the then tiny company decided to bet big, firing a cannonball on the 1103 and subsequent line of memory chips. The 1103 became the best-selling memory chip in the world, and the subsequent family of chips provided a foundation for Intel’s breakout from struggling start-up into successful company. Had Intel not fired multiple bullets to discover which path would work, it might have placed a bad big bet. Fortunately, Intel’s founders had the discipline to test and evaluate before placing the big bet.

The Thinking Machine - Stephen Witt

Introduction:

“This is the story of how a niche vendor of video game hardware became the most valuable company in the world. It is the story of a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in silicon and the small group of renegade engineers who defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it is the story of the birth of an awesome and terrifying new category of artificial intelligence, whose long-term implications for the human species cannot be known. At the center of this story is a propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated man. His name is Jensen Huang, and his thirty-two-year tenure is the longest of any technology CEO in the S&P 500.

Huang is a visionary inventor whose familiarity with the inner workings of electronic circuitry approaches a kind of intimacy. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow.

Vivoli was a clever guy who viewed a limited budget as an opportunity. He had noticed that in making purchasing decisions, gamers relied on a half-dozen independent hardware reviewers. Vivoli reached out to the reviewers, informing them that the GeForce was the world’s first “graphics-processing unit,” or “GPU.” Vivoli’s team had, in fact, made this term up, but the reviewers began grouping products in the category. Soon, graphics accelerators were universally known as GPUs. “We invented the category so we could be the leader in it,” Vivoli said.

Huang had managed to stay ahead of his competitors so far, but his asset-light “merchant” business was essentially just a collection of engineers sitting around a Silicon Valley office park. If those engineers weren’t constantly developing new, difficult-to-replicate technology,

manufacturers in Asia would start knocking off his chips, and Nvidia would cease to exist. “If we don’t reinvent computer graphics, if we don’t reinvent ourselves, and we don’t open the canvas for the things that we can do on this processor, we will be commoditized out of existence,” Huang later said. Not to gamble was the biggest risk of all.

NINE: Cuda

“To distinguish himself, Huang had to pursue a strategy that so defied conventional business logic that ATI wouldn’t follow. He had to build an exploratory product, like a $300 entry-level scientific supercomputer that not only didn’t have competitors but also didn’t even have obvious customers. The zero-billion-dollar market, by definition, was one that only he would participate in—one that only he would even see. Huang was going to build a baseball diamond in a cornfield and wait for the players to arrive.