The result: Nvidia organized around delivering something new every six months. This meant a new architecture followed by two improved derivatives over an approx 18 month period. That turned 3dfx’s development schedule into a trap.
Conclusion: disciplined execution above all else.
Its interesting how even I didn't realize how competitive he was...until after the market realized recently. Wish these books would come out a year earlier than they did. :/
I guess i'm not cut out for stock trading. I'm always arriving as the train is departing both in real life and on the market.
That explains the SUPERs that were released seemingly very quickly after the original models. Looks like the 5 series will miss out on that due to the ram shortages and prioritising their HBM server models.
As it turns out, neither is anyone else, even people who do it for a living. (If we constrain the definition of "stock trading" to mean researching and picking individual stocks.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
Great times, the 3dfx name will always raise a smile for me.
It's wild how hazy those memories are becoming. Getting old is weird.
That brings back some memories.
And then I wanted a GeForce so bad. But I only got £10 a week from my paper round.
If I’d invested just one week of my paper round in Nvidia shares though, it would be worth over £10 million today.
At the time stock trades were still expensive. I remember one of the obstacles was thinking that of the small amount of birthday money I had saved up, $20 was going to go into the purchase and another $20 would have to come out of the sale. Then they explained taxes to me.
None of it would have mattered if I had been able to buy and hold, but at the time I remember being sad that even doubling my money would result in $40 of fees plus taxes, eating most of the gains.
...they would still have fumbled it.
3dfx failed for a single reason: Failure to design for the future.
They had a hyperfocus on brute force rasterization and fill rate that became detrimental. They dropped the ball on 32-bit rendering because they thought having a higher fill rate was more important. They dropped the ball on implementing hardware transform because they considered that the CPU's job.
And then they blew up their own business model buying STB Systems and manufacture cards themselves, rather than selling chips to other manufacturers. That ended up being a gift to NVIDIA who adopted the opposite strategy of providing chips, reference designs, drivers, etc. and let a large number of board manufacturers compete to sell them.
And then there's the fact that NVIDIA was allowing themselves to create new architectures, while 3dfx was basically just saying "Let's make the same GPU, but with more texture units". By the time the Voodoo5 came out, NVIDIA was already on the GeForce 2.
3dfx lost because it kept optimizing for yesterday. NVIDIA understood where the industry was going and 3dfx didn't, and there's little reason to think AI would have gone any differently. If 3dfx had somehow survived another 20 years, I'd expect them to arrive at the AI boom with the world's fastest rasterizer.