The Stanford-trained engineer cofounded Nvidia just as he turned 30 in 1993, after stints at AMD and LSI Logic. Huang and cofounders Christopher Malachowsky (currently Nvidia's vice president of information technology) and Curtis Priem (who retired in 2003) looked at the cartoonish PC games of the time, such as Castle Wolfenstein 3d, and saw their future in improving the visual experience. The company capitalized on the "fabless" trend that allowed a chip firm to concentrate on design and avoid billions of dollars of capital spending by outsourcing production to Asian factories. Nvidia is a big customer at wafer fabs run by Taiwan Semiconductor and United Microelectronics.
Nvidia stumbled in the first few years. Its first product tried to do too much and was based on Nvidia's own quirky standard. After a round of layoffs in late 1995 Huang gathered the company's 35 remaining employees in a room and leveled with them: The company would have to find a way to catch up, fast. He gave up Nvidia's software to focus on the DirectX graphics standard that Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) was building into millions of PCs.
Huang spent $1 million, a third of the company's cash, on a technology known as emulation, which allows engineers to play with virtual copies of their graphics chips before they put them into silicon. That allowed Nvidia to speed a new graphics chip to market every six to nine months, a pace the company has sustained ever since. Says Richard Bergman, senior vice president with the graphics unit at competitor AMD: "They raise the bar every time."
Intel is going to make its own graphics product out of its general-purpose processors, and AMD will seek to fold sophisticated graphics capabilities into its CPUs, stealing business that would otherwise have gone Huang's way. The problem is, by doing twice as much, Huang says, the bigger firms won't be able to offer the flashiest graphics capabilities quite as often. And Huang knows that if you can deliver something better, even if for just six months, you'll satisfy that fickle customer.
