Jensen Huang and Satya Nadella relive the Windows 95 days.
“If you could just do a little transfer of market cap back to me,” he joked, a nod to how far Nvidia’s valuation has climbed. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, sitting next to him, had a quick reply. Huang shot back: “I do that every day. The conversation, hosted by Sriram Krishnan, former senior policy adviser for AI at the White House, came right after Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra and a range of laptops built on Nvidia’s new RTX Spark chip.
Huang went back to late 1992, when Windows 3.1 was showing what a personal computer could become. The result is RTX Spark, which Huang said took over 4,000 engineering years and has been tested on more than 1,200 applications. RTX Spark laptops from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI and Microsoft’s own Surface are now up for preorder and begin shipping on October 16.
He admitted he had never seen a PC at the time, having mostly worked on workstations, file servers and the supercomputers used to design chips. He and his co-founders imagined a PC with 3D graphics that could play games, work as a workstation and be used to design things.