Tag Archives: arm

development, imagination, Internet of things

Imagination at Mobile World Congress 2015: what is the strategy?

At MWC earlier this month I met with Imagination, best known for its PowerVR video design but also now the owner of the MIPS CPU. Apple is a shareholder and uses Imagination video technology in the iPhone and iPad. This market is highly competitive though, especially since ARM has its own Mali GPU. “You need complete platforms, you need a processor,” Tony King-Smith, executive VP of Technology Marketing, told me. “All the markets that matter to us are integrating towards a single chip. For a single chip you need some mix of central processing, communications, and multimedia.”

MIPS is a supported CPU for Android 2.3 or higher but most Android devices run ARM or Intel CPUs. Why no MIPS devices at MWC?

“There is one and a half to two years between a licensee picking up the IP, and delivering silicon based on it,” an Imagination’s spokesperson said. “We are engaged with customers but until something shows up we cannot disclose any names. Next year we are going to see some progress and potentially something I can show you.” Watch this space then.

What is Imagination’s strategy overall? King-Smith told me that the company is well placed to satisfy the need for optimisation and differentiation in an increasingly mature mobile market. It is also eyeing the IoT (Internet of things) space with interest. “Wearables need completely new architectures,” said King-Smith. “Not just tweaking a mobile chip. That’s where we’re going.”    

I was also interested to see a real demo of Vulkan, the successor to OpenGL, on the Imagination stand, based on the preliminary specification. “It will enable people to make more use of our platform”, said King-Smith, because of the lower level access it offers to the GPU.

image_thumb[10]

For more on Vulkan see this piece on the Reg.

What about the Creator board which Imagination has released, a low-priced starter kit along the lines of Raspberry Pi but of course with MIPS and more powerful graphics? It is an effort to build the ecosystem, said King-Smith. “It is a means for us to deliver our IP and make it easier for developers to engage with us. We also want to enable start-ups and new solutions.” It is primarily for developing and testing ideas, then, but if you want to go into production with it, that is fine too. “That board has been designed to ramp in volume,” King-Smith told me.

microsoft, professional, windows

Windows 8 to be called Windows 8, no Outlook on ARM

5 Comments

Microsoft has announced the range of editions planned for Windows 8, which is now the official name (previously it was a code name).

Here is what I found interesting. Windows on Arm (WOA) is now called Windows RT and ships with Office included. However, Outlook is not included, confirming my suspicion that Outlook may gradually get de-emphasised in favour of separate email, calendar and task managers built into the operating system but with strong Exchange support – a good move since Outlook is perhaps the most confusing and over-complex application that Microsoft ships.

Windows RT is missing some features which are in the Intel versions, not least the ability to install desktop software, but has an unique feature of its own: device encryption.

I consider Windows RT as critical to the success of the Windows 8 project, and the only edition that may compete effectively with the Apple iPad in terms of price, convenience, battery life and usability. That said, the market will see the Intel version as primary, since it is the one that can run all our existing apps, but all the legacy baggage will also weigh it down. Users will suffer the disjunction between Metro and Desktop, and will need mouse or stylus and keyboard to use desktop applications. The danger is that Windows RT will get lost in the noise.

mobile, tablets

Just three Windows 8 on ARM tablets at launch? Not good for Microsoft

2 Comments

image

Bloomberg reports unknown sources stating that only three Windows on ARM (WOA) tablets will be available at launch:

There will be fewer ARM-based devices in the rollout because Microsoft has tightly controlled the number and set rigorous quality-control standards, said one of the people. The new version of Windows will be the first to use ARM processors, which are most commonly found in smartphones. Windows 7, the current version, only works with Intel’s technology. Three of the Windows 8 ARM devices will be tablets, the people said.

This may be nonsense but I can see this playing out badly for Microsoft. I am making several assumptions here:

1. The design of Windows 8 is all about tablets. If it fails on tablets, then it has failed.

2. Windows 8 Intel tablets will not compete with the Apple iPad and will probably not do well. The main reason is the old one: Windows desktop is mostly unusable with touch alone. I mean, you can get it to work but it is not much fun, and that will not change.  Supplementary reasons are that Intel CPUs are less efficient than ARM which means shorter battery life, and that traditional Windows applications expect lots of disk space and RAM, and that OEMs will want to pre-install anti-malware and other foistware, and repeat the mistakes of the past that are driving users with relief towards iPads.

I can also imagine Windows 8 Intel tablets being sold with add-on styluses and keyboards that are necessary to operate desktop applications, but a nuisance in all sorts of ways.

3. Windows on ARM has more potential to be a compelling iPad alternative. Metro-style apps are designed for tablets and will work well with touch alone. ARM devices may be lightweight and with long battery life. The locked-down Windows Store is some protection against excessive OEM interference. With Microsoft Office compatibility thrown in, these might appeal to a business user who would otherwise buy an iPad.

Despite the above, my guess is that Microsoft’s OEM partners will instinctively put most of their effort into Windows 8 on Intel tablets, because that it the way it has always been, and because of an assumption that someone buying a Windows 8 device will want to run Windows applications, and not just Metro-style apps.

The problem is that such people will try Windows 8 on Intel tablets, hate them because of the reasons in (2) above, and end up buying iPads anyway.

The counter argument? That Apple conquered the tablet market with just one model, so perhaps three is more than enough.

hardware, intel, software development, windows

NVIDIA plans to merge CPU and GPU – eventually

2 Comments

I spoke to Dr Steve Scott, NVIDIA’s CTO for Tesla, at the end of the GPU Technology Conference which has just finished here in Beijing. In the closing session, Scott talked about the future of NVIDIA’s GPU computing chips. NVIDIA releases a new generation of graphics chips every two years:

  • 2008 Tesla
  • 2010 Fermi
  • 2012 Kepler
  • 2014 Maxwell

Yes, it is confusing that the Tesla brand, meaning cards for GPU computing, has persisted even though the Tesla family is now obsolete.

image
Dr Steve Scott showing off the power efficiency of GPU computing

Scott talked a little about a topic that interests me: the convergence or integration of the GPU and the CPU. The background here is that while the GPU is fast and efficient for parallel number-crunching, it is of course still necessary to have a CPU, and there is a price to pay for the communication between the two. The GPU and the CPU each have their own memory, so data must be copied back and forth, which is an expensive operation.

One solution is for GPU and CPU to share memory, so that a single pointer is valid on both. I asked CEO Jen-Hsun Huang about this and he did not give much hope for this:

We think that today it is far better to have a wonderful CPU with its own dedicated cache and dedicated memory, and a dedicated GPU with a very fast frame buffer, very fast local memory, that combination is a pretty good model, and then we’ll work towards making the programmer’s view and the programmer’s perspective easier and easier.

Scott on the other hand was more forthcoming about future plans. Kepler, which is expected in the first half of 2012, will bring some changes to the CUDA architecture which will “broaden the applicability of GPU programming, tighten the integration of the CPU and GPU, and enhance programmability,” to quote Scott’s slides. This integration will include some limited sharing of memory between GPU and CPU, he said.

What caught my interest though was when he remarked that at some future date NVIDIA will probably build CPU functionality into the GPU. The form that might take, he said, is that the GPU will have a couple of cores that do the CPU functions. This will likely be an implementation of the ARM CPU.

Note that this is not promised for Kepler nor even for Maxwell but was thrown out as a general statement of direction.

There are a couple of further implications. One is that NVIDIA plans to reduce its dependence on Intel. ARM is a better partner, Scott told me, because its designs can be licensed by anyone. It is not surprising then that Intel’s multi-core evangelist James Reinders was dismissive when I asked him about NVIDIA’s claim that the GPU is far more power-efficient than the CPU. Reinders says that the forthcoming MIC (Many Integrated Core) processors codenamed Knights Corner are a better solution, referring to the:

… substantial advantages that the Intel MIC architecture has over GPGPU solutions that will allow it to have the power efficiency we all want for highly parallel workloads, but able to run an enormous volume of code that will never run on GPGPUs (and every algorithm that can run on GPGPUs will certainly be able to run on a MIC co-processor).

In other words, Intel foresees a future without the need for NVIDIA, at least in terms of general-purpose GPU programming, just as NVIDIA foresees a future without the need for Intel.

Incidentally, Scott told me that he left Cray for NVIDIA because of his belief in the superior power efficiency of GPUs. He also described how the Titan supercomputer operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA will be upgraded from its current CPU-only design to incorporate thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, with the intention of achieving twice the speed of Japan’s K computer, currently the world’s fastest.

This whole debate also has implications for Microsoft and Windows. Huang says he is looking forward to Windows on ARM, which makes sense given NVIDIA’s future plans. That said, the I get impression from Microsoft is that Windows on ARM is not intended to be the same as Windows on x86 save for the change of processor. My impression is that Windows on ARM is Microsoft’s iOS, a locked-down operating system that will be safer for users and more profitable for Microsoft as app sales are channelled through its store. That is all very well, but suggests that we will still need x86 Windows if only to retain open access to the operating system.

Another interesting question is what will happen to Microsoft Office on ARM. It may be that x86 Windows will still be required for the full features of Office.

This means we cannot assume that Windows on ARM will be an instant hit; much is uncertain.

microsoft, nokia

Windows 8 Tablet in June 2012? If so, I am betting ARM not Intel x86

2 Comments

An interview with Paul Amsellem, new boss at Nokia France, includes this remark:

Et en juin 2012, nous aurons une tablette fonctionnant sous Windows 8

which even my schoolboy French can translate:

and in June 2012 we will have a tablet running Windows 8

Now, that is sooner than I had expected based on what we saw at the BUILD conference in September, and on past experience of Windows beta cycles. Windows 7, for example, was previewed in October 2008 and went into public beta in January 2009. A release candidate arrived in May 2009, and the gold release (the first production release) was towards the end of July 2009.

Although that does not sound much different from September 2011 to June 2012, bear in mind that the gold release is the moment when PC manufacturers can test their hardware with the production code. They still have to manufacture, package and distribute the machines, which is why the first machines with Windows 7 pre-installed did not arrive until October 2009. Hence the “general availability” date for Windows 7 of October 22 – three months after the gold release.

In order to achieve a June release for Windows 8 then, you would expect Microsoft to be done by March 2011. We have yet to see the first beta (the BUILD version is a preview) and a gold release for the x86 Windows 8 in March seems to me most unlikely. Of course it could be done, but only by compromising quality. The quality of the Windows 7 first release was excellent, and Microsoft is smart enough not to jeopardise its Windows 8 launch with a sub-standard product.

Is the Nokia man then either mis-informed or mis-quoted? Either is possible; but I also wonder whether Windows 8 on ARM will play by different rules. Microsoft said little about the ARM release at BUILD, though it was on show in the exhibition.

My impression is that the ARM release will be locked-down and that the only way to install apps will be via the app store. It will also be designed for specific hardware, unlike Windows x86 where people may grab an install CD and set it up on any old PC they can find; it is not guaranteed to work, but often it does.

That means Microsoft has much less to do in terms of compatibility testing, both for hardware and applications.

It follows that, despite being a new platform for Windows, the ARM release might actually be quicker to build than the x86 release. I can just about believe that Microsoft could be ready to hand over a gold build to Nokia in March 2012.

If that is the case, then the big risk is that apps will be scarce. It would give developers little time to create apps for the new platform, and it would also be interesting to see if the Office team at Microsoft could deliver something of real value by then.

Microsoft is under intense pressure from Apple’s iPad as well as Android competitors in tablets. Although it will want to get to market quickly, the company must also realise than a botched first release makes recovery hard. This will be interesting to watch.

adobe, development, google, microsoft, mobile, windows, windows 7

NVIDIA Tegra 2: amazing mobile power that hints at the future of client computing

Smartphone power has made another jump forward with the announcement at CES in Las Vegas of new devices built on NVIDIA’s new Tegra 2 package – a System on a Chip (SoC) that includes dual-core CPU, GPU, and additional support for HD video encoding and decoding, audio, imaging, USB, PCIe and more:

image

The CPU is the ARM Cortex-A9 which has a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture and a 32-bit instruction set. It also supports the Thumb-2 instruction set which is actually 16-bit. How is 16-bit an upgrade over 32-bit? Well, 16-bit instructions means smaller code, even though it gets translated to 32-bit instructions at runtime:

For performance optimised code Thumb-2 technology uses 31 percent less memory to reduce system cost, while providing up to 38 percent higher performance than existing high density code, which can be used to prolong battery-life or to enrich the product feature set.

The GPU is an “ultra low power” (ULP) 8-core GeForce. In essence, the package aims for high performance with low power consumption, exactly what is wanted for mobile computing.

Power is also saved by sophisticated power management features. The package uses a combination of suspending parts of the system, gating the clock speed, screen management, and dynamically adjusting voltage and frequency, in order to save power. The result is a system which NVIDIA claims is 25-50 times more efficient than a typical PC.

According to NVIDIA, Tegra 2 enables web browsing up to two times faster than competitors such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8250 or Texas Instruments OMAP 3630 – though of course these companies also have new SoCs in preparation.

Tegra 2 is optimised for some specific software. One is the OpenGL graphics API. “The job of the GPU is to implement the logical pipeline defined by OpenGL”, I was told at an NVIDIA briefing.

image

I asked whether this meant that Tegra 2 is sub-optimal for Microsoft’s Direct X API; but NVIDIA says it is sufficiently similar that it makes no difference.

Nevertheless, Tegra 2 has been designed with Android in mind, not Windows. There are a couple of reasons for this. The main one is that Android has all the momentum in the market; but apart from that, Microsoft partnered with Qualcomm for Windows Phone 7, which runs on Snapdragon, shutting out NVIDIA at the initial launch. NVIDIA is a long-term Microsoft partner and the shift from Windows Mobile to Android has apparently cost NVIDIA a lot of time. The shift took place around 18 months ago, when NVIDIA saw how the market was moving. That shift “cost us a year to a year and a half of products to market”, I was told – a delay which must include changes at every level from hardware optimisation, to designing the kind of package that suits the devices Android vendors want to build, to building up knowledge of Android in order to market effectively to hardware vendors.

Despite this focus, Microsoft demonstrated Windows 8 running on Tegra during Steve Ballmer’s keynote, so this should not be taken to mean that Windows or Windows CE will not run. I still found it interesting to hear this example of how deeply the industry has moved away from Microsoft’s mobile platform.

Microsoft should worry. NVIDIA foresees that “all of your computing needs are ultimately going to be surfaced through your mobile device”. Tegra 2 is a step along the way, since HDMI support is built-in, enabling high resolution displays. If you want to do desktop computing, you sit down at your desk, pop your mobile into a dock, and get on with your work or play using a large screen and a keyboard. It seems plausible to me.

During the press conference at CES we were shown an example of simultaneous rich graphic gaming on PC, PlayStation 3, and Tegra 2 Smartphone.

image

Alongside Android, Tegra 2 is optimised for Adobe Flash. NVIDIA has been given full access to the source of the Flash player in order to deliver hardware acceleration.

image

image

Actual devices

What about actual devices? Two that were shown at CES are the LG Optimus 2X:

image

and the Motorola Atrix 4G:

image

Both sport impressive specifications; though the Guardian’s Charles Arthur, who attended a briefing on the Atrix 4G, expresses some scepticism about whether HD video (which needs a large display) and the full desktop version of FireFox are really necessary on a phone. Apparently the claimed battery life is only 8 hours; some of us might be willing to sacrifice a degree of that capability for a longer battery life.

Still, while some manufacturers will get the balance between cost, features, size and battery life wrong, history tells that we will find good ways to use these all this new processing and graphics power, especially if we can get to the point where such a device, combined with cloud computing and a desktop dock, becomes the only client most of us need.

NVIDIA says that over 50 Android/Tegra 2 products are set to be released by mid-2011, in tablet as well as Smartphone form factors. I’m guessing that at least some of these will be winners.

microsoft, professional, windows

NVIDIA’s first CPU, Project Denver, aims to bring ARM to desktops and servers

At CES in Las Vegas today NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the company’s first CPU: Project Denver. This is a partnership with ARM, to create “a full custom processor” targeting “high performance computing – servers, PCs, super-computers, cloud computing.” NVIDIA will still licence ARM processors for mobile computing.

Since ARM has in the past focused on the mobile and embedded market, and NVIDIA on GPUs, it is a departure for both companies.

Why? Huang says it is because ARM is “the new standard microprocessor architecture.” Judging by this chart, shown at the press briefing, it is hard to disagree:

image

In a few years, said Huang, “There will be more ARM processors shipped than all the x86 chips ever shipped.”

image

NVIDIA’s press release explains that the purpose of Project Denver is to extend the range of ARM systems upwards:

For several years, makers of high-end computing platforms have had no choice about instruction-set architecture.  The only option was the x86 instruction set with variable-length instructions, a small register set, and other features that interfered with modern compiler optimizations, required a larger area for instruction decoding, and substantially reduced energy efficiency.

Denver provides a choice.   System builders can now choose a high-performance processor based on a RISC instruction set with modern features such as fixed-width instructions, predication, and a large general register file.   These features enable advanced compiler techniques and simplify implementation, ultimately leading to higher performance and a more energy-efficient processor.

The other interesting aspect of Project Denver is its integration with the GPU – as you would expect from NVIDIA:

An ARM processor coupled with an NVIDIA GPU represents the computing platform of the future.  A high-performance CPU with a standard instruction set will run the serial parts of applications and provide compatibility while a highly-parallel, highly-efficient GPU will run the parallel portions of programs.

While we tend to focus most on power efficiency for mobile devices, because we notice how long our batteries last, it is equally important for larger systems. Power consumption and dealing with heat is a key issue for datacentres, while in everyday desktop computing power consumption is a significant proportion of the running cost of an IT system.

Project Denver puts a different spin on Microsoft’s Windows-on-ARM announcement today. The assumption is that Microsoft has in mind a mobile future for Windows; but if Denver takes off it could be important on desktops and servers as well.

Before getting too excited, it is worth recalling how Intel’s Itanium, cruelly dubbed the Itanic, mostly failed in the market. That was partly thanks to design problems, and partly because the industry was too deeply hooked into x86 applications. I also recall Motorola’s doomed attempts to sell Windows NT on PowerPC in the mid Nineties.

Denver could fare better, thanks to the ubiquity of ARM in the mobile world. That said, much will depend on whether a Denver-based system really does offer significant benefits over whatever Intel and/or AMD will have come up with by the time it ships. If it is less than spectacular, Denver will be a hard sell.

.net, microsoft, mobile, multimedia, professional, silverlight, software development

Windows 8 will run on ARM processors – a natural home for Silverlight?

4 Comments

Microsoft announced today at CES in Las Vegas that the next version of Windows will run on ARM as well as Intel CPUs. But why? The reason is that ARM CPUs have huge momentum in mobile computing, thanks to their low power consumption. Microsoft wants Windows to support System on a Chip (SoC) architectures such as NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, which has two ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs combined with an HD-capable graphics processor in a single package. In its press release, the company is careful not to upset established x86/x64 partners Intel and AMD too much, emphasising that Windows will run on SoC packages based on those CPUs as well.

It is an interesting announcement, but one that raises as many questions as answers. The first concerns Microsoft’s mobile strategy, with Windows now seeming to encroach on territory that you have thought belonged to its embedded operating system, Windows CE, which underlies both Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7. With all its legacy APIs, full-blown Windows does not seem ideal for low-powered, resource-constrained mobile devices; yet the company seems set on bringing full Windows rather than something based on Windows Phone 7 to the emerging tablet market.

The second issue is that applications will need at least re-compiling, and in many cases some re-coding, in order to run on ARM CPUs. Microsoft says it will deliver Office for ARM:

Sinofsky: Microsoft Office is an important part of customers’ PC experience and ensuring it runs natively on ARM is a natural extension of our Windows commitment to SoC architectures.

Windows and Office alone is enough for a decent business device; but customers who buy Windows on ARM expecting their existing games or applications to run will be disappointed.

We have been here before. In the early days of Windows CE, devices ran a variety of processors such as MIPS or Hitachi SH3, and developers had to compile multiple binaries and create setups that installed the right one on each device. In an attempt to overcome the friction this created, Microsoft introduced the Common Executable Format (CEF) with Windows CE 3.0 in 2000. This was an intermediate language format which was translated to native code by a “translator” when it was installed onto a device.

It sounds  a bit like .NET or Java; and it was indeed a forerunner of the .NET Common Language Runtime, which appeared in 2002. However, CEF never really caught on. Although it solved deployment issues, it introduced performance problems and was troublesome to debug. Most developers preferred to stick with true native code.

Today though .NET is mature; and we also have Silverlight, a cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework combined with multimedia player and graphics framework. If Microsoft includes .NET and Silverlight in its ARM build of Windows, that would solve some of the deployment problems, especially for business devices. Many custom applications are built for .NET; and these would in principle run without any need to recompile, since a .NET executable is intermediate code which is compiled to native code at runtime, though any code which includes “platform invoke” calls to native APIs would not work.

It is surprising therefore that neither .NET nor Silverlight is mentioned in Windows president Steve Sinofsky’s Q&A about Windows on ARM. Still, we should not read too much into that. It would be madness if Microsoft did not support its .NET technologies on this new platform, would it not?

development, mobile, multimedia, professional, software development

NVIDIA CEO on the spot: explains Fermi delays, CUDA vs OpenCL, rise of the tablet

1 Comment

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsung Huang spoke to the press at the GPU Technology Conference and I took the opportunity to ask some questions.

image

I asked for his views on the cloud as a supercomputer and whether that would impact the need for local supercomputers of the kind GPU computing enables.

Although we expect more and more to happen in the cloud, in the meantime we’re going to keep buying devices with more and more solid state memory. The way to think about it is, storage is simply a surrogate for bandwidth. If we had infinite bandwidth none of us would need storage. As bandwidth improves the requirement for storage should reduce. But there’s another trend which is that the amount of data we collect is growing incredibly fast … It’s going to be quite a long time before our need for storage will reduce.

But what about local computing power, Gigaflops as opposed to storage?

Wherever there is storage, there’s GigaFlops. Local storage, local computing.

Next, I brought up a subject which has been puzzling me here at GTC. You can do GPU programming with NVIDIA’s CUDA C, which only works on NVIDIA GPUs, or with OpenCL which works with other vendor’s GPUs as well. Why is there more focus here on CUDA, when on the face of it developers would be better off with the cross-GPU approach? (Of course I know part of the answer, that NVIDIA does not mind locking developers to its own products).

The reason we focus all our evangelism and energy on CUDA is because CUDA requires us to, OpenCL does not. OpenCL has the benefit of IBM, AMD, Intel, and ourselves. Now CUDA is a little difference in that its programming approach is different. Instead of an API it’s a language extension. You program in C, it’s a different model.

The reason why CUDA is more adopted than OpenCL is because it is simply more advanced. We’ve invested in CUDA much longer. The quality of the compiler is much better. The robustness of the programming environment is better. The tools around it are better, and there are more people programming it. The ecosystem is richer.

People ask me how do we feel about the fact that it is proprietary. There’s two ways to think about it. There’s CUDA and there’s Tesla. Tesla’s not proprietary at all, Tesla supports OpenCL and CUDA. If you bought a server with Tesla in it, you’re not getting anything less, you’re getting CUDA more. That’s the reason Tesla has been adopted by all the OEMs. If you want a GPU cluster, would you want one that only does OpenCL? Or does OpenCL and CUDA? 80% of GPU computing today is CUDA, 20% is OpenCL. If you want to reach 100% of it, you’re better off using Tesla. Over time, if more people use OpenCL that’s fine with us. The most important thing is GPU computing, the next most important thing to us is NVIDIA’s GPUs, and the next is CUDA. It’s way down the list.

Next, a hot topic. Jen-Hsun Huang explained why he announced a roadmap for future graphics chip architectures – Kepler in 2011, Maxwell in 2013 – so that software developers engaged in GPU programming can plan their projects. I asked him why Fermi, the current chip architecture, had been so delayed, and whether there was good reason to have confidence in the newly announced dates.

He answered by explaining the Fermi delay in both technical and management terms.

The technical answer is that there’s a piece of functionality that is between the shared symmetric multiprocessors (SMs), 236 processors, that need to communicate with each other, and with memory of all different types. So there’s SMs up here, and underneath the memories. In between there is a very complicated inter-connecting system that is very fast. It’s nearly all wires, dense metal with very little logic … we call that the fabric.

When you have wires that are next to each other that closely they couple, they interfere … it’s a solid mesh of metal. We found a major breakdown between the models, the tools, and reality. We got the first Fermi back. That piece of fabric – imagine we are all processors. All of us seem to be working. But we can’t talk to each other. We found out it’s because the connection between us is completely broken. We re-engineered the whole thing and made it work.

Your question was deeper than that. Your question wasn’t just what broke with Fermi – it was the fabric – but the question is how would you not let it happen again? It won’t be fabric next time, it will be something else.

The reason why the fabric failed isn’t because it was hard, but because it sat between the responsibility of two groups. The fabric is complicated because there’s an architectural component, a logic design component, and there’s a physics component. My engineers who know physics and my engineers who know architecture are in two different organisations. We let it sit right in the middle. So the management lesson learned – there should always be a pilot in charge.

Huang spent some time discussing changes in the industry. He identifies mobile computing “superphones” and tablets as the focus of a major shift happening now. Someone asked “What does that mean for your Geforce business?”

I don’t think like that. The way I think is, “what is my personal computer business”. The personal computer business is Geforce plus Tegra. If you start a business, don’t think about the product you make. Think about the customer you’re making it for. I want to give them the best possible personal computing experience.

Tegra is NVIDIA’s complete system on a chip, including ARM processor and of course NVIDIA graphics, aimed at mobile devices. NVIDIA’s challenge is that its success with Geforce does not guarantee success with Tegra, for which it is early days.

The further implication is that the immediate future may not be easy, as traditional PC and laptop sales decline.

The mainstream business for the personal computer industry will be rocky for some time. The reason is not because of the economy but because of mobile computing. The PC … will be under disruption from tablets. The difference between a tablet and a PC is going to become very small. Over the next few years we’re going to see that more and more people use their mobile device as their primary computer.

[Holds up Blackberry] There’s no question right now that this is my primary computer.

The rise of mobile devices is a topic Huang has returned to on several occasions here. “ARM is the most important CPU architecture, instruction set architecture, of the future” he told the keynote audience.

Clearly NVIDIA’s business plans are not without risk; but you cannot fault Huang for enthusiasm or awareness of coming changes. It is clear to me that NVIDIA has the attention of the scientific and academic community for GPU computing, and workstation OEMs are scrambling to built Tesla GPU computing cards into their systems, but transitions in the market for its mass-market graphics cards will be tricky for the company.

Update: Huang’s comments about the reasons for Fermi’s delay raised considerable interest as apparently he had not spoken about this on record before. Journalist Nico Ernst captured the moment on video: