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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

> "His answer: 'Not at all. Intel should be afraid of us. We will be bigger than them.' There was not a trace of doubt."

Given all the times that HN readers have derided grandiose executive pronouncements preceding flops, more people should recognize the above for what it is: not profundity but just puffery that happened to pan out. Not that skill and effort weren't involved in making it pan out but that any of a zillion things could have gone wrong to make that statement false and part of any manager's job is to project confidence and instill motivation despite knowing that.

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I think he had a strategy - utilizing the massively parallel computation of GPUs for more general purpose compute as Moore's law tailed off - and he noticed that Intel couldn't see the lights of this in the rear view mirror.

Everybody's known that Moore's law was on its way out, for speed increases at least, since the mid 2000s - the seminal article was by Herb Sutter [1]. So hardware needed to get more parallel. But multicore is a distinctly different paradigm to CUDA, which is closer to SIMD but on a completely different order of magnitude. So Intel was never going to get to where the puck was skating.

[1] http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

Such behaviour is off putting to many geeks, myself included. Still i'd disagree. He had a vision, followed it and made it a reality.

That’s the point, though. This is no different than any other statement made by a CEO with good engineers behind them.

This time it worked out. Can’t give it a survivorship bias. I don’t personally mind CEOs being encouraging, but at least understand that they don’t really ever know.

IMO one big factor is that Nvidia is still fully engineering driven - it's engineers all the way to the top making the calls. Intel was like that as well, and then lost it (until Gelsinger). IMO you need domain experts in charge of companies, or they can't thrive in the long run, not unless there is an actual, almost unsurpassable moat.

Exactly, and they invest in their talent pool. They dont over-hire and then lay off thousands.

Was gonna say, this easily could have been Steve Balmer saying the iPhone will fail because it doesn’t appeal to business customers.

Credit for going after a vision, but every CEO has a vision and acts like it will inevitably happen.

Let us suppose that NVidia did not reach success with their mining, or with cuda.

The statement: "Not at all. Intel should be afraid of us. We will be bigger than them." is still true.

How is it true? Gaming rigs. No matter what processor people chose, people overwhelmingly choose Nvidia graphics cards.

If Intel was inside 50% of the market's rigs, Nvidia is in 70+% of those same rigs.

The statement wasn't puffery. The statement was made with naked, and overwhelming, confidence.

Exactly, what CEO has not confidently said that they're great?

Spez said they are not profitable right as they are trying to get their shit together for a favorable IPO.

Nah, you did not answer the question.

Gerald Ratner

Stephen Elop when he was CEO of Nokia said "we are standing on a burning platform".

It's called leadership. George Washington wasn't a brilliant general but he was able to convince people they were going to win against an empire. Whether he actually believed it himself we'll never know.

fake it till you make it while people are dying. takes serious confidence.

The gentry of that era was trained for this from a young age.

Sources please.

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