Nvidia CEO Talks ATI

Jen-Hsun Huang reveals his views on the rival graphics card company, as well as Nvidia’s relationships with Microsoft and Sony.

The Sunday San Jose Mercury-News contained a piece by Dean Takahashi profiling the graphics executive. Today, Takahashi’s blog contains an extended portion of the interview.

The recent purchase of ATI by chip-maker AMD put Huang’s comments in an interesting light.

During the interview, Huang was asked how he viewed ATI. “They are a formidable competitor. They have wonderful people. It’s the same way I’ve seen them before.”

Later he was asked what he observed from the sidelines of the competition between AMD and Intel. Huang’s view is that “AMD’s advantage is that they are small, nimble and very focused. They can exploit the seams that a large company leaves behind. That’s what they did. They exploited the fact that the enthusiast and video game market for PCs was still very large and performance still mattered. They collaborated with people that can help them build entire platforms like us.”

When asked if Nvidia could exploit competition between chip manufacturers, Huang replied, “We can support both processors and always have. I don’t know that we exploit the competition between them. We have plenty of competition ourselves.”

Full interview, found here.