Nvidia as a High-Flyer

choi

Don Clark, Nvidia’s Chips Make It One of Tech’s Hot Prospects. New York Times, Sept 2, 2017.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/ ... idia-chipmaker.html

My comment:
(a) I am sure the cn.nytimes.com will publish the translation Monday, Sept 4, 2017. But I will have no access to the Web that day.
(b) "Engineers at CTA.ai, an imaging-technology start-up in Poland, are trying to popularize a more comfortable alternative to the colonoscopy. To do so, they are using computer chips that are best known to video game fans.  The chips are made by the Silicon Valley company Nvidia. Its technology can help sift speedily through images taken by pill-size sensors that patients swallow, allowing doctors to detect intestinal disorders 70 percent faster than if they pored over videos. As a result, procedures cost less and diagnoses are more accurate, said Mateusz Marmolowski, CTA's chief executive."
(i)
(A) The www.CTA.ai website(in both Polish and English) is not informative; no need to visit.
(B) .ai
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai
(for Anguilla)

The company chooses .ai as a gimmick to imply artificial intelligence.
(ii) The NYT report is wrong to say capsule is for colonoscopy 大肠镜.

Understanding Capsule Endoscopy. American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE), undated
https://www.asge.org/home/for-pa ... g-capsule-endoscopy
("Capsule endoscopy helps your doctor evaluate the small intestine. This part of the bowel cannot be reached by traditional upper endoscopy [gastroscopy 胃镜] or by colonoscopy. * * * eight hours" which is the time the capsule spends in small intestine -- altogether, 1-3 days needed for the disposable capsule to come out from anus along with stool)

Capsule endoscopy is not new. Unlike gastroscopy and colonoscopy, capsule endoscopy 内视镜 can diagnose but can not treat (by removing a polyp for pathological examination, for example)

(c)  "The company’s chips — known as graphics processing units, or GPUs — are finding homes in drones, robots, self-driving cars, servers, supercomputers and virtual-reality gear. A key reason for their spread is how rapidly the chips can handle complex artificial-intelligence tasks like image, facial and speech recognition."

See (e) below.
(d) "Its [Nvidia's] stock-market value has swelled more than sevenfold in the past two years, topping $100 billion, and its revenue jumped 56 percent in the most recent quarter. * * * [In comparison, Intel] had revenue growth of just 9 percent in the most recent quarter."

Market capitalization for TSMC, Intel and AMD (a sometime competitor with Nvidia in GPU) yesterday were 187, 165 and 12 billion, respectively. TSMC for the first time surpassed Intel in Market cap in late March for a week, fell back, rose above again since the very beginning of May 2017, and the lead has widened.

(e) "many simple instructions must be executed in parallel, which is why graphics chips evolved with many tiny processors. A new GPU announced by Nvidia in May, called Volta, has more than 5,000 such processors [cores]; a new, high-end Intel server chip, by contrast, has just 28 larger, general-purpose processor cores. "
(i) Alessandro Volta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta
(1745 – 1827; Italian)
(ii) multi-core processor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor
(the single processor can run multiple instructions on separate cores at the same time)
(iii) The Intel 28-core chips are Xeon® Platinum 8180 CPU. (8176 is also 28-core. Both 8176 and 8180 are calable and debuted on July 11, 2017.)

(f) "Mr Huang — who, like Mr Jobs at Apple, pushed for a striking headquarters building, which Nvidia will soon occupy"

The new headquarters is designed by Gensler.
(i) Nvidia, Gensler, undated
https://www.gensler.com/projects/nvidia
(ii) Gensler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gensler