Greetings from San Jose, and NVIDIA’s GTC 2018 conference. Following an interesting set-up day on Monday when, in the late afternoon, we discovered we had a boundary control issue (our booth had been installed in slightly the wrong place), Tuesday’s highlight was, as usual, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address.
At the start of the presentation, Jensen promised to show the assembled throng Amazing Graphics, Amazing Science, Amazing AI, and Amazing Robots – and he delivered. From astonishing live-rendered Star Wars scenes using real-time ray tracing through to an NVIDIA employee using “teleportation” to sit in an NVIDIA holo-deck and remote drive a car through the convention hall parking lot, the two and a half hour keynote raced by.
One thing to mention. Every year, the line for this keynote starts earlier and gets longer. As a San Diegan, the keynote itself feels more like a cultural event like our Comic-Con than a technical conference.
There was an awful lot to digest and we hope to provide some additional background and context to the announcements over the next few days once we’ve got our breath back. For now, though, two quick takeaways from yesterday morning.
Number 1: Buy more GPUs, save money. (If you watch the video, you’ll see this was a recurring joke from throughout the presentation, and I’ll probably not be let back in the event if I don’t share Jensen’s core message.)
Number 2: Moore’s Law might be broken. NVIDIA seems to have beaten it over the last five years – quite handily!
