The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant

by Tae Kim

Jobs ended the meeting after about twenty minutes to head to another. As he prepared to leave, he had some parting advice for the Nvidia team. “You guys have really got to do some work on mobile because ATI is kicking your ass in laptops,” he said, referring to Nvidia’s main rival after the demise of 3dfx. Without hesitating, Diskin responded, “Actually, Steve, I think you’re wrong.” The room went quiet. Jobs fixed Diskin with his intense stare and said, “Tell me why?” Diskin got the sense that not many people challenged Steve Jobs, and it was clear he expected a good answer. Diskin had one. He explained that Nvidia’s chips did indeed consume more power—indeed, more power than most laptops could muster—because they offered the higher performance that desktop users required. But their performance and power consumption could easily be lowered to meet laptop specs. In fact, Diskin argued, if Nvidia lowered the clock speed of its chips down to match the speed—and therefore power requirements—of ATI’s chips, Nvidia’s chips would actually offer better overall performance. It wasn’t that ATI was kicking Nvidia’s ass in laptops, as Jobs had thought. It was just that Nvidia had not needed to create a chip specifically for a lower-power laptop model, when a throttled-down version of its flagship line would do the job just fine. “We have more headroom,” Diskin said, summarizing his main argument. Jobs stared at him one more time. “Okay,” was all he said. The meeting was over. Thirty ...