1972 moved to the United States with his family and was sent to a Christian school in Kentucky, USA. After finishing the course, he moved to Oregon. /kloc-At the age of 0/5, he participated in the American Open Table Tennis Championships and won the third place in the Youth Doubles Competition.
1984 obtained a degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University and a master's degree from Stanford University.
Huang Renxun worked in AMD( 1983-1985) and LSI Logic (1985-1993).
NVIDIA was founded in 1993. Huang Renxun is a famous workaholic in the circle. He once explained why he was so enthusiastic: for our children, let their future be better.
Looking back at the history of Huang Renxun, I always feel that there is another reason for this answer-his childhood was quite bumpy.
Studying in Huang Renxun is to keep young children in the United States. When I was 9 years old, my brother, who was one year older than me, was sent to my uncle's house in Washington State by my father. According to him, the father of an engineer did this mainly for educational reasons.
After arriving in the United States, my uncle's family was very poor, and soon the two brothers were sent to a rural boarding school in Kentucky. Huang Renxun later recalled that this school was actually more like a juvenile reformatory. Every child has a knife and all the students have tattoos.
Years later, when Huang Renxun recalled this life, he admitted that he had participated in many naughty activities, such as climbing walls, stealing food and even smoking. But "this dangerous lesson" did not make him worse, but learned to be strong and adapt to the environment, which he thought would be good for his life.
Facing this world, fortunately, this kind of life only lasted for two years. Huang Renxun's parents came to the United States and he was able to enter a regular school. It seems to be a patent of China people. Huang Renxun's performance was excellent, and he showed extraordinary talent in table tennis, which made him almost a professional player, and his personal best result was the third place in doubles in the United States.
However, Huang Renxun said that because he "loves technology more", he immediately pulled out of his hobby after the senior high school entrance examination and entered the electronics major of Oregon State University. This year, he 16 years old. When he was in college, his career plan was grand and he was determined to become a global graphic emperor.
It is interesting for Huang Renxun to speak Chinese. Strictly speaking, he doesn't speak Chinese very well. He always listens hard when others are talking. Then, he will simply answer. But after only a few words, he seemed to be out of breath, with an embarrassed smile on his face, and then began to speak fluent English. At the same time, I am sorry to say that my Chinese is really not at home. But when you have treated him as a foreigner, he can speak a few more Chinese.
If language is a cultural symbol, we can know that Huang Renxun is essentially an American. Then, for an American young man who graduated from the university of 1983 majoring in electronics, his best or inevitable choice is obviously to go to Silicon Valley. At that time, in Silicon Valley, Intel and AMD were just two junior players in the star-studded semiconductor companies, and Microsoft only sold its MS-DOS to IBM, far from being a star. Wang An's company is in full swing, setting an example for the youth in China.
However, Huang Renxun didn't start his own company until 10 years later. Huang Renxun promised his wife Lori that he would have his own company when he was 30.
Huang Renxun's first step on the road to Silicon Valley was to join AMD and become a chip designer, which laid the initial technical foundation for his later founding of NVIDIA. Two years later, he jumped to LSI Logic. This is also a chip company, but its main business is not CPU, but graphics processing of chips. However, at that time, no matter CPU or graphics chip, there was no situation in which one or two enterprises monopolized the market like today, but a pattern of mutual competition. Compared with industries with relatively clear models, it is easier for such entrepreneurial companies to learn how to seize opportunities and taste failure.
Another thing in LSI logic is also very meaningful to Huang Renxun. After working in the design department for two years, he asked to be transferred to the sales department and eventually became the general manager of integrated chips (similar to today's SOC, that is, integrating multiple functions on one chip).
Regarding this change, Huang Renxun said, "Moving from the engineering department to the sales department is the best career choice I have ever made, and I gradually learned how to combine product design and development with the market. Because I realized that consumers don't care which business school you graduated from, they only care about one thing. What's good about your product? "
Mr. Huang Renxun, the founder of news material NVIDIA, is a highly personalized technology tycoon. Every year, he takes out some interesting things at the Taipei Computer Show. On the first day of the opening of COMPUTEX 20 13, Mr. Huang Renxun was interviewed by the Asia-Pacific media. Cloud-based virtualization technology and multi-screen game sharing are the focus of his content introduction.
Career Path1At the end of 992, Chris and Pream, two technicians who had worked in SUN, will be brought into the entrepreneurial team in NVIDIA. Because of his technical background and understanding of sales and management, Huang Renxun was elected President and CEO, and he has held these two positions since then. His first day at work was1February, 1993 17. It was his 30th birthday and he had just fulfilled his promise to his wife.
An interesting episode is that when Huang Renxun started his own company, he called an analyst of the Bay Area Company for advice on his plan to start a business in the field of graphics chips. The analyst named Jon later recalled: "At that time, Huang Renxun made a special phone call to inquire about the graphics chip market and its future trend. I told him that the market had not started yet, and it was a mess. There are nearly 30 companies now, so you'd better not do this. "
NVIDIA's first choice reflects the influence of several entrepreneurs' previous technical experience-they like to find another way. They chose the square imaging technology that was not optimistic at that time; Paying attention to the universality of the chip, we chose the idea of integrating many functions such as gamepad and sound card.
However, this product named NV 1 was not successful, and the first investment raised by NVIDIA was spent. Huang Renxun had to persuade non-core employees to leave and promised to rehire them when the company improved in the future. The scale of the company has also changed from more than 100 to more than 30 at once.
In times of crisis, it was Sega's $7 million deposit that saved Huang Renxun. Japanese game console companies are optimistic about the good integration of NVIDIA chips into games, and ask them to develop display chips for Saturn game consoles. Unfortunately, due to the persistence of square wire drawing technology, NV2 chip was abandoned by Sega before the development was completed. Fortunately, this $7 million helped NVIDIA survive the Win95 era.
The first darling of Win95 era is not Huang Renxun, but 3DFX company, which developed the famous voodoo display card. However, with the advent of computer graphics era, display chips have become the focus of attention in PC systems, and the market demand is unprecedented. At this point in time, many graphics card companies disagreed with Microsoft's D3D API interface and insisted on developing their own interfaces.
Huang Renxun noticed this problem. He resolutely decided to fully support Microsoft's interface. At the same time, he proposed the "Yellow Law" in the field of graphics chips, also known as Moore's Law, that is, the performance of graphics chips doubles every six months.
Huang Renxun, who found the right direction, after nearly three years of silence, introduced NV3, namely Liwa 128, and boldly adopted the concept of AGP, which was still in the experimental stage at that time. Soon after, Liwa 128zx is a "small movie tyrant" that Chinese people are very familiar with. Moreover, according to Huang's law, he launched TNT and TNT2 in the autumn of 1998 and February of 1999 respectively, and since then, he has occupied the mainstream position of the graphics card chip market in one fell swoop, pushing all competitors to the edge. Six months later, at the end of 1999, Huang Renxun unexpectedly introduced a display chip with a brand-new architecture. That is, GeForce256 took the lead in bringing the display chip industry into the GPU era.
Since the concept of GPU was put forward, although it has experienced several ups and downs, today, Huang Renxun has been playing the leading role of the graphics card chip and has never fallen behind.
Speaking of this feeling, he quoted his own experience of playing table tennis to reporters: "You should analyze your opponent and yourself. At the same time, the rules of the game are different every day. You should also analyze the advantages and disadvantages of your current position and the disadvantages of your competitors. You should protect and enhance your strengths and attack your opponents' weaknesses. "
For a long time, people have predicted that the development of CPU will replace GPU, a special graphics hardware, just as many special functions are replaced by CPU-from hardware Hanka to hardware sound card.
So, will NVIDIA transform from a graphics chip company to a CPU company?
On this issue, he did not deny this conjecture, but implicitly said: "A very important feature of the company is to adjust itself to some changes in the market. Intel was originally a memory company. NVIDIA's current product is GPU, and it is entirely possible to adjust the product according to customers' needs in the future. "
Huang Renxun, a promising young man, is 20 years old and a chief engineer in the engineering laboratory of Oregon State University. He "brazenly" promised his first girlfriend Lori that he would have his own company at the age of 30. Soon after, Lori became his wife. Huang Renxun founded NVIDIA with two like-minded engineers more than a month before his 30th birthday. In order to fulfill his promise, he also specially set the first day of work on his birthday.
1999, NVIDIA launched the world's first graphics processor (GPU); Since then, GPU has become another important computing unit independent of CPU. The following year, when the company launched the second generation GPU, it boldly put forward its own "Yellow Law": NVIDIA's core strategy is to upgrade its products every six months and double its functions. At that time, there was a famous law in the industry, that is Moore's Law, which was founded by Moore, the founder of Intel Corporation: every 18 months, the number of transistors that can be accommodated on a chip doubled, and the performance also doubled. Compared with Moore's Law, Huang's Law is twice as fast in technical updating.
His "big mouth" was once again verified: since then, NVIDIA has continuously introduced higher-performance GPUs, gradually defeating many competitors and becoming theNo. 1 in the field of visual computing, while Huang Renxun has also become the youngest billionaire in Silicon Valley.
Today, NVIDIA has grown into a "big" company with a revenue of $3.4 billion and a market value of $7.3 billion, but Huang Renxun is still outspoken and says whatever comes to mind. He doesn't pay attention to the so-called public relations strategy of big companies at all, and he is not afraid of angering competitors many times stronger than himself. In April, 2007, at the Intel Information Technology Summit, Henry Kissinger, vice president of Intel Corporation, announced that Intel would soon launch Larrabee architecture integrating CPU and GPU, and claimed that the graphics card would disappear in two or three years. After hearing this news, Huang Renxun scoffed, and soon delivered a long speech at the analyst conference in NVIDIA, "defining" Intel's plan as a joke. "Even if Intel can increase its graphics computing power by 65,438+00 times in 2065,438+00, it still cannot compete with NVIDIA's current products." He is always full of confidence in his field.
The character played table tennis very well when he was a child. /kloc-participated in the American table tennis championship for the first time at the age of 0/3, and the result was a mess. After returning home, he constantly reflected and found himself lost in inattention: he just arrived in Las Vegas, was attracted by the beautiful scenery of the city, and was still wandering in the commercial street the night before the game. After that, he began to treat table tennis with a dedicated attitude, and two years later, he won the third place in doubles at the American Open Table Tennis Championships.
After starting a business, he was also very focused on his work. In his view, work is an incorrect word. He gets up at 6: 0015 every morning, exercises for an hour, then starts to have breakfast, then goes to work and doesn't go home until evening. After dinner with his family, he will continue to work until he is too tired to sleep. He seldom plays golf or goes out with friends. He basically stays at home after work and is still playing. Before his two children go to college, his home will be like this at night: four people each take a laptop to do their own work, although they are all at home and communicate by email. He has always enjoyed this kind of life. "I do four things every day: work, think, help others and create new things."
/kloc-where does he want NVIDIA to go in 0/0 years? "I hope our employees can look at the world like children, so that ten years later we can still be as innovative and creative as we are now."
Wealth Ranking On April 7, 2020, Huang Renxun ranked 36th1on Forbes' list of global billionaires in 2020 with a wealth of US$ 4.7 billion.