The single most important property of a computing platform is its install base, not the elegance of its architecture.

12:14architecture could attract enormous amounts of criticism. For example, no architecture has ever attracted more criticism than the x86.... you know, as a less than, less than elegant architecture, but yet it is the defining architecture of today. It gives you an example that in fact so many RISC architectures which were beautifully architected, incredibly well-designed by some of the brightest computer scientists in the world, largely failed. And so I've given you two

12:49examples where one is, you know, one is elegant, the other one's barely aesthetic, and so yet x86 survived and the reason for- - Install base is everything. - Install base defines an architecture. Not... Everything else is secondary, okay? And so there were other architectures at the time. CUDA came out, OpenCL was here. There were... You know, there's several other competing architectures. But the thing that... The decision that we made that was good

13:15was we said, "Hey, look, ultimately it's about, Install base and what is the best way we could get a new computing architecture into the world?" By that timeframe, GeForce had become successful. We were already selling millions and millions of GeForce GPUs a year, and we said, "You know, we ought to put CUDA on GeForce and put it into every single PC whether customers use it or not,

13:43and use it as a starting point of cultivating our install base." Meanwhile, we'll go and attract developers, and we went to universities and wrote books and taught classes and put CUDA everywhere. And eventually people discover... And at the time, the PC was the primary computing vehicle. There was no cloud, and we could put a supercomputer in the hands of every researcher in school, every scientist, you know, every engineering school, every...

14:11or every student in school, and eventually something amazing will happen. Well, the problem was CUDA increased our cost of that GPU, which is a consumer product, so tremendously, it completely consumed all of the company's gross profit dollars. And so at the time, the company was probably, you know, worth, I don't know, at the time, eight... Was it like $8 billion or something? Like six, $7 billion or something like that.