Chip, what is it?
This question is put into this day, even people who don't understand technology can say something to some extent.
On October 18 last year, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a stricter ban on chip exports to China, while clarifying the hardware performance standards for restricted chips.
As soon as this historic ban was promulgated, it immediately attracted a lot of attention!
The U.S. blacklist includes Nvidia's highest-performance chips A100 and H100, and interestingly, Nvidia's founder Jensen Huang is actually a Chinese-American with Huang.
Nvidia is a US-based semiconductor company that specializes in the design and manufacture of graphics processing units (GPUs).
It has set a number of notable milestones in its history, and last year became the first chip company with a market capitalization of more than a trillion dollars.
As a result, founder Jensen Huang also became the first Chinese entrepreneur in history to push the value of his business into a trillion dollars and continue to sit in the CEO position.
Of course, NVIDIA's success is not only reflected in its market capitalization, but also in its dominance in the field of graphics processing.
With the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, NVIDIA has transformed into a leader in the field of artificial intelligence computing. Its share of the AI chip market is as high as 914%, far more than the 8 of competitor AMD5%。
NVIDIA's A100 chip is considered to be the computing power threshold for the research and development of AI large models, and it is **rapid in a short period of time**.
Founder Jensen Huang was born in Taipei in 1963. His father was a chemical engineer and his mother was an elementary school teacher.
Compared with the glory of his career, Huang's background seems ordinary and ordinary, and even has some turbulent overtones.
In the '70s, when the situation in Taiwan was unstable, the Huang family was forced to relocate, and finally went back and forth, and Huang, 9, was sent alone on a flight to the United States to join relatives.
However, relatives in the United States do not have time to take care of more, and Huang's overall situation can be said to be very poor, and bullying is a common occurrence.
But he quickly adapted to the environment and found a suitable way to survive, an experience that shaped his fearless character.
Fortunately, two years later, Huang's parents also immigrated to the United States, ending his terrible life.
Then, Huang began to show the unique genetic talent of the Chinese, with excellent grades and good sports. But instead of going down the sports path, he became interested in technology.
He began to dedicate himself to studying electronics at Oregon State University and then at Stanford University.
After graduating, Huang worked as a chip designer at AMD and then moved on to another chip company, LSI Logic, where he benefited from his experience.
With a deep understanding and passion for the chip market, the 30-year-old decided to co-found his own company, NVIDIA, with his best friends.
However, the early days of the business were not all smooth sailing, and the two products, NV1 and NV2, failed due to deviation from mainstream technology, and the company was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Subsequently, the contract of the game company Sega turned around, but the development of the wrong architecture led to the product being incompatible with Windows.
After candid communication with Sega's top management, Nvidia extended its operating cycle and eventually developed the Microsoft-compliant Riva128, which saved the company.
Then, there is the conventional development path, which cannot be said to be very smooth, and it has somewhat fallen into a bottleneck until 2012!
This year was also seen by Huang as an important turning point for NVIDIA, as Professor Li Feifei's team won the ImageNet competition with NVIDIA GPUs, ushering in the era of deep learning and highlighting the importance of GPUs in AI development.
Today, NVIDIA's business has expanded into several areas. In the field of graphics processing, Nvidia's graphics cards still have a monopoly on powering virtual reality.
However, the new U.S. export restrictions to China have caused Nvidia heavy losses, and the lost Chinese market accounts for 25% of Nvidia's total profits.
It is unclear whether Huang can lead LinkedIn to a better future in the future, but China has begun to accelerate the development of semiconductors.