Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company owes its existence to Windows. At a Microsoft event in San Francisco, he traced how Windows and DirectX helped shape the graphics-processing market.
Huang recalled Windows 3.1 in 1992, saying he and his co-founders imagined a personal computer with 3D graphics for gaming and design. Windows 95 later made it possible to connect a graphics processor to a PC, while Direct3D, part of DirectX, let applications use the chip’s capabilities.
Huang also credited collaboration between Nvidia and Microsoft on DirectX 8 with the development of programmable shaders. That work eventually contributed to CUDA, Nvidia’s platform for parallel computing. “If not for Windows, there would be no GeForce,” he said, adding that without GeForce, AI researchers such as Andrew Ng would not have had a computer for deep learning.
Huang spoke onstage with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan. Nadella joked that Nvidia could transfer some of its market value to Microsoft. Huang replied, “I do that every day.”
The conversation followed a presentation of new Surface devices and laptops built on Nvidia’s RTX Spark platform. The companies said preorders were open and shipments would begin Oct. 16. Huang said development had taken more than 4,000 engineering years and involved testing over 1,200 applications.