Nvidia's Jensen Huang to Receive SIA's 2021 Robert N. Noyce Award

[Lightwreather]

Summary

CEO of Nvidia gets award named after CEO of Intel

Quotes

Quote

"Jensen Huang’s extraordinary vision and tireless execution have greatly strengthened our industry, revolutionized computing, and advanced artificial intelligence," said John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO. "Jensen’s accomplishments have fueled countless innovations — from gaming to scientific computing to self-driving cars — and he continues to advance technologies that will transform our industry and the world. We’re pleased to recognize Jensen with the 2021 Robert N. Noyce Award for his many achievements in advancing semiconductor technology." 

Jensen Huang is the thirty-first semiconductor industry executive to receive the Robert Noyce award. Over the years, four Intel executives, three IBM executives, three Texas Instruments executives, two AMD executives, two Applied Materials executives and two Micron executives have received the award.  

"It has been the greatest joy and privilege to have grown up with the semiconductor and computer industries, two that so profoundly impact the world," said Huang. "As we enter the era of AI, robotics, digital biology, and the metaverse, we will see super-exponential technology advances. There’s never been a more exciting or important time to be in the semiconductor and computer industries." 

The Robert Noyce award was created in 1990 by the SIA Board of Directors to honor the memory of Robert Noyce, who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, Intel in 1968 and the Semiconductor Industry Association in 1977. 

 

My thoughts

Well, this is must be nice for Mr. Leather Jacket, excuse me, Mr. Jensen Huang (who has been pictured here without his Leather jacket or his kitchen). Well, Sarcasm aside, this is a pretty big deal for him, and iirc, Dr. Lisa Su also received this award last year. Well, I hope nvidia continues to come out with great products (and hopefully they're more efficient)

Sources

Tomshardware

SIA

[da na]

Noyce.

[Velcade]

25 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

for his many achievements in advancing semiconductor technology

Is he really putting the work in?  I always saw CEOs more as figure heads.  Hard to believe he's in the lab pushing tech.

[Beerzerker]

3 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

"Jensen Huang’s extraordinary vision

Must be for his revelation about "The more you buy, the more you save" statement.

I do hope they can change the landscape of hardware availability but not gonna hold my breath over it, esp since alot of this is revenue-based and we know where all that came from.

[Quackers101]

Claim the glory before they bring doom to us peasants and their workers!

At least their AI work seems more interesting, and when Nvidia buys them all.

[poochyena]

1 hour ago, Velcade said:

Is he really putting the work in?  I always saw CEOs more as figure heads.  Hard to believe he's in the lab pushing tech.

yea? Look at AMD, they were at the verge of bankruptcy until they got a new CEO. CEOs are who control the company. You can have the smartest people in the industry, but a bad CEO can make little use of that and hurt the company. See: Intel.

[LAwLz]

12 minutes ago, poochyena said:

yea? Look at AMD, they were at the verge of bankruptcy until they got a new CEO. CEOs are who control the company. You can have the smartest people in the industry, but a bad CEO can make little use of that and hurt the company. See: Intel.

AMD's current success has very little to do with Lisa Su. 

Intel's current struggles have very little to do with Bob Swan. 

 

Just because a company is doing well or poorly does not mean it is the CEO that made that happen. 

[poochyena]

15 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

AMD's current success has very little to do with Lisa Su. 

Intel's current struggles have very little to do with Bob Swan. 

 

Just because a company is doing well or poorly does not mean it is the CEO that made that happen. 

what? So you really think its just a complete coincidence that change in CEO has directly correlated to change in success of amd and intel in the past 20 years?

[tikker]

The forums only showed "Nvidia's Jensen Huang to Re" and my mind immediately went "resign", but this is more pleasing news. Good for him.

[BuckGup]

40 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

AMD's current success has very little to do with Lisa Su. 

Intel's current struggles have very little to do with Bob Swan. 

 

Just because a company is doing well or poorly does not mean it is the CEO that made that happen. 

Why even have a CEO then? I mean it would be much more cost effective if they didn't and they apparently have very little to do in a companies success. I get where you are coming from but that's not really true. They might not be hands on in the lab or think tank but they play a major role especially in a company as big as Nvidia. I bet he has meetings 7am until 9pm everyday and probably is jet lagged forever and has to balance his life extremely well. Not everyone can be a CEO even if they know more technically 

[LAwLz]

13 minutes ago, poochyena said:

what? So you really think its just a complete coincidence that change in CEO has directly correlated to change in success of amd and intel in the past 20 years?

If you're talking about AMD's sudden success then I think that is attributed far more to TSMC pulling ahead in the manufacturing space at the same time as Intel started struggling with their own process nodes. Those things would have happened regardless of who was CEO at the time.

 

See my posts in this thread if you want to see my thoughts on the whole "Lisa Su is so amazing because she made AMD great!".

  

On 7/8/2021 at 11:52 AM, LAwLz said:

Quote

Lisa Su is another example. She pretty much raised AMD from the dead. I always hate giving credit to leadership because they always bang on their chest when winning and fire the workers below when not doing great, but she obviously did many things right and her charisma on stage further helps with the brand and the products they make also speak for themselves. It's not just "oh she's cool on the stage and she's a woman".

Did she do that, or did the engineers that actually worked on the products they sell raise them from the dead? Did she raise them from the dead, or did for example Intel's issues with 10nm and TSMC's sudden lead in process nodes raise them from the dead?

You say that you don't want to give credit to leadership because they always bang on their chests but that is exactly what you are doing right now.

You're accrediting the collective work of thousands upon thousands of people to a single person going "look at how great Lisa is for raising AMD from the dead".

 

Lisa Su might be a great CEO. I can't really say one way or the other, but to give her credit for raising AMD from the dead seems to be exactly the kind of BS I am sick and tired of. Giving a single person the credit for the works of other people.

It's only natural for people to think of Lisa Su as AMD since she is the face of the company. When AMD is doing well people think Lisa is doing well. The problem is that AMD has over 10,000 employees. Lisa Su is not AMD. AMD is a collective of over 10,000 people. When AMD designs a good processor it's not Lisa Su who designed a good processor. It was the thousands of employees at AMD that did.

 

 

  

Yes, and we should thank the thousands of engineers at AMD for that. Not Lisa Su.

Stop giving management the credit for what their workers achieve.

 

Lisa Su wasn't even CEO when AMD started working on Zen, so I think it's mind blowingly stupid to attribute that to her.

AMD started development of Zen after they had hired Jim Keller, which happened in 2012. The team was also headed by Suzanne Plummer, and Michael Clark was the chief architect of Zen (I am saying this so that people don't start circle jerking about how Jim Keller saved AMD).

Lusa Su became CEO in 2014...

[LAwLz]

9 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

Why even have a CEO then? I mean it would be much more cost effective if they didn't and they apparently have very little to do in a companies success. I get where you are coming from but that's not really true. They might not be hands on in the lab or think tank but they play a major role especially in a company as big as Nvidia. I bet he has meetings 7am until 9pm everyday and probably is jet lagged forever and has to balance his life extremely well. Not everyone can be a CEO even if they know more technically 

Because CEOs are important to a company for reasons other than developing products. CEOs aren't the ones that are in charge of solving issues with manufacturing processes, or design chips. They are management staff. They do things like balance budgets. They do things like approve of higher level recruitment and promotions. They are the face of the company (essentially a PR person) not just to consumers but more importantly, shareholders. They are responsible for how the company is doing, but are rarely in control of how it is going (at least not at a highly technical and cutting edge company like AMD or Intel).

They are part of (but not the sole decision maker) of major structural changes of the company or high level plans of how the company operates and functions.

 

Intel recently announced that they would open up their fabs to third parties and made some big announcements of how that would work. 

Pat Gelsinger was most likely a key player in getting that strategy approved, but it is very likely that it was not his idea, nor that he came up with any of the changes that would have to be made in order to accommodate this plan. Those things were probably proposed by several people 3-5 tiers down in the hieratical management structure. 

[Forbidden Wafer]

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I think it's mind blowingly stupid to attribute that to her.

As the Acer COO said, AMD stands for Astonishing Miracle Delivered. 

 

[BuckGup]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

Because CEOs are important to a company for reasons other than developing products. CEOs aren't the ones that are in charge of solving issues with manufacturing processes, or design chips. They are management staff. They do things like balance budgets. They do things like approve of higher level recruitment and promotions. They are the face of the company (essentially a PR person) not just to consumers but more importantly, shareholders. They are responsible for how the company is doing, but are rarely in control of how it is going (at least not at a highly technical and cutting edge company like AMD or Intel).

And you don't think anything they do results in how well things are going? You can't have one without the other and they directly feed off one another so no I disagree. A CEO is just as important as a lead design engineer. The CEO cannot replace a lead engineer and vice versa. You can make edge cases but the reality is the CEO does a lot of shit regardless of how well they technically know their own product. I agree with what you said though that they shouldn't be praised as the leading cause of success as it's the company meticulously working together for success. 

[Quackers101]

doesn't it depend on what the CEO does or for what company?

If they have to follow up and be up to date on most things and make critical desicions and what group and tech that should be focused on? And maybe balance out the biases that might come with working on a project with their own biases and what they can allow, however take the credit from the team that did most of the work... eeh. However at least they do set an image of who they are and what they do, something I guess Lisa Su have done a good job at? Unlike the boring intel keynotes that are more interesting on paper and never spoken much at all about?

 

As without a leader it can go nowhere and use up all resources on "nothing" or ends up becoming that, a good leader that might be able to push things forward?

[StDragon]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Intel's current struggles have very little to do with Bob Swan. 

 

Just because a company is doing well or poorly does not mean it is the CEO that made that happen. 

Wasn't Bob and/or the other previous CEOs responsible for letting the bean counters dictate the direction of development? Having bean counters vs engineers at the helm really does make a difference. One is risk averse while the other provides confident direction and leadership.

[porina]

Where I used to work broke things down into three levels: vision, strategy, execution. Vision was the role of senior management, CEO and direct reports giving input. They have to move the company in the right direction for the future. Strategy was translating that into something more tangible. Execution is doing the hands on work to make it happen. In other words, what do you want to do?, how do you do it?, and then actually doing it.

[LAwLz]

2 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

And you don't think anything they do results in how well things are going?

Now you're just making a silly strawman argument.

Of course CEOs has SOME influence over how a company is doing. It's just far less than I think some people on this forum thinks.

 

 

AMD's success and Intel's struggles do in fact have next to nothing to do with their Lisa Su and Bob Swan though.

AMD's successful products were in development years before Lisa Su became CEO and Intel's struggles started long before Bob Swan was CEO. That's what I said and it is the truth. I never said CEOs didn't have anything to do with how the company is doing. CEOs have some control over high level decisions at the company. Emphasis on "some" and "high level decisions". 

 

AMD's current success and Intel's current struggles are caused by things not related to CEO decisions.

AMD was successful because of clever design choices engineers came up with and got approved by their management (which are several tiers away from the CEO) and TSMC's engineers enormous success over the last couple of years.

Intel has been struggling because things have not been going according to plans, and it is because of technical details that are very far removed from what CEO's deal with.

 

11 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

As the Acer COO said, AMD stands for Astonishing Miracle Delivered. 

What does that have to do with anything?

[poochyena]

33 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Those things would have happened regardless of who was CEO at the time.

No it wouldn't have. Companies are ran by leaders. Things don't "just happen". AMD shift to focus on servers and enterprise, and intel chose to continue to manufacture their own chips and tried to take a bigger than usual leap in node shrinking. Both were CEO decisions and had a big impact on the companies.

[Forbidden Wafer]

21 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

What does that have to do with anything?

You're downplaying how managers impact the business.
Just look at SpaceX. If it were not for Elon, it wouldn't even exist. SpaceX/Rocketlab's "fail fast" vs ULA's "never fail".
Rapid reusability became a necessity to compete with them, and now everyone is trying to catch up, including dinosaurs from ULA and Roscosmos.

[LAwLz]

11 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

If they have to follow up and be up to date on most things and make critical desicions and what group and tech that should be focused on?

Depends on what you mean by "critical decisions". Lisa Su is with 99.9% certainty not involved in any technical decisions such as what tech should be focused on or how things should be developed. Management at a company as large as AMD is a multi-tier hieratical structure.

The CEO isn't even the "top dog" when it comes to decision making. That's what the board of directors are for. The CEO is responsible for carrying out the directives decided upon by the board of directors.

 

 

 

18 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Wasn't Bob and/or the other previous CEOs responsible for letting the bean counters dictate the direction of development? Having bean counters vs engineers at the helm really does make a difference. One is risk averse while the other provides confident direction and leadership.

 

Not sure what you mean. If you're asking if Bob or the other CEO (those name is Brian Krzanich for those interested) was responsible for letting people who cared about making money be in charge of the company then no, that was not their fault.

 

I think very few people on this forum understands how large companies are structured or works. I don't mean this as a dig at you or anyone else, because most people can go through their entire lives without getting in contact or even needing to know how large companies are structured.

"The bean counters" are always the ones in charge of the company. Even at AMD, Lisa Su answers to the board of directors, which are the "bean counters". They are the ones that set the long-term goals and oversees the direction of the company. It is their directives that gets passed on to the CEO, which are then responsible for carrying them out. Since no single person can actually manage that alone, the tasks gets broken up into smaller directives and then assigned to other people in the hierarchy, and this repeats several times.

 

Also, I completely disagree with this narrative Linus has pushed that "you need an engineer as a leader" or "it was because Bob Swan wasn't an engineer that caused Intel issues". 

You don't have to look any further than to Intel to see what an absolute load of bollocks that reasoning is.  

 

On 1/13/2021 at 6:39 PM, LAwLz said:

I don't get why people think having a technical background makes you better to run a company. 

It's not the CEO that comes up with new products or develops them. 

 

Paul Otellini had no technical background but ran Intel when they became the dominant player and launched things like the first i3, i5 and i7 lineups. 

 

Their previous CEO, Brian Krzanich, was an engineer and he ran Intel from when they were at top (took over after Sandy Bridge) to when AMD knocked Intel out with zen and zen2. 

 

Remember, Bob Swan has only been the Intel CEO for like a year and a half or something like that. 

 

[StDragon]

5 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

You're downplaying how managers impact the business.
Just look at SpaceX. If it were not for Elon, it wouldn't even exist. SpaceX/Rocketlab's "fail fast" vs ULA's "never fail".
Rapid reusability became a necessity to compete with them, and now everyone is trying to catch up, including dinosaurs from ULA and Roscosmos.

That's the difference between a "leader" and a "visionary".

Steve Jobs wasn't just a leader, he was a visionary. Tim Cook however is just a leader.

[Forbidden Wafer]

11 minutes ago, StDragon said:

That's the difference between a "leader" and a "visionary".

Steve Jobs wasn't just a leader, he was a visionary. Tim Cook however is just a leader.

Even Tim Cook, Allen Brack and others. They screw up? Products are doomed to fail.
Brack cut down Warcraft 3 reforged budget.
It came out completely borked and nothing like it was promised and they even took down OG Warcraft 3. Lost a bunch of players... FOREVER.
They have shown Diablo 2 remastered, now are starting to break their promises by delaying basic features (e.g. local multiplayer) ...

[LAwLz]

17 minutes ago, poochyena said:

No it wouldn't have. Companies are ran by leaders. Things don't "just happen". AMD shift to focus on servers and enterprise, and intel chose to continue to manufacture their own chips and tried to take a bigger than usual leap in node shrinking. Both were CEO decisions and had a big impact on the companies.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

 

AMD did not, and has not "shift to focus on servers and enterprise". AMD's current trend of breaking into the server market is a by-product of them actually making a good CPU architecture, and that was already on its way before they changed CEO. Even if AMD had decided to focus more on the server market, that would have been a decision more up to someone like Darren Grasby who is AMD's CSO, probably in collaborations with Dan McNamara (AMD's vice president and GM of the server team).

 

Intel did not "try to take a bigger than usual leap in node shrinking". Not sure where you got that idea from.

 

Intel did choose to continue to manufacture their own chips, but that was because they always thought they were soon going to fix their manufacturing issues. Hindsight is always 20/20, but at the time they thought they were close to making their process work. Intel's manufacturing process is not like TSMC's. Intel couldn't just decide one day "hey, let's switch to TSMC". They would have had to scrap massive parts of their designs to switch to TSMC, on top of it being a logistics nightmare (see current chip shortages) as well as the massive financial issues that would arise (such as their own fabs losing most of their "customer" base).

It would have looked really stupid to do all that if Intel's plans had played out as well, because Intel kept thinking that they just needed a little more time and then they would be ready.

 

If you're building a house and think you will be finished in 6 months, it doesn't make sense to go "you know what, let's tear the entire house down, move to another city, build a new house over there, hire some construction workers to rebuild this house we just tore down and then we'll move in here in a year or so".

 

It might make sense if you have the power of 20/20 hindsight and realize that there are plenty of issues with the house and it will take more than just 6 months to fix everything, but if you don't know that when you are making the decision to keep building then the decision to keep building makes sense.

[LAwLz]

22 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

You're downplaying how managers impact the business.
Just look at SpaceX. If it were not for Elon, it wouldn't even exist. SpaceX/Rocketlab's "fail fast" vs ULA's "never fail".
Rapid reusability became a necessity to compete with them, and now everyone is trying to catch up, including dinosaurs from ULA and Roscosmos.

No I am not downplaying it. 

Elon Musk can not be compared to people like Lisa Su or Bob Swan because Elon Musk is not just the CEO of SpaceX.

He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer at SpaceX. Of course someone with three roles will be more influential over a company that someone who has one role.

 

 

 

It is mind blowing how many basic things people in this thread gets wrong. It honestly feels like I am talking to high school students who has zero experience with how a company operates.