For the last 12 years David Kirk has been NVIDIA’s head of research, but NVIDIA has now announced that he has been swapped. It was clear though that Kirk had in no way been doing a bad job or performed worse over the last period, he has in turn been appointed NVIDIA Fellow. It therefore lies closely by to think that NVIDIA is trying to change gear in the R&D department, something it also implies in the press release.
The new name to remember is Bill Dally has a completely different background than the last chief engineer. Before appointed he was Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, specialized in parallel workloads. He has 50 or so patents backing up his research and two published books, although less experience working in the private sector. It’s worth mentioning that he is currently working on a project at Stanford called ELM (efficient low-power microprocessor). NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had the following to say about Bill Dally:
“I am thrilled to welcome Bill to NVIDIA at such a pivotal time for our company. His pioneering work in stream processors at Stanford greatly influenced the work we are doing at NVIDIA today. As one of the world’s founding visionaries in parallel computing, he shares our passion for the GPU’s evolution into a general purpose parallel processor and how it is increasingly becoming the soul of the new PC. His reputation as an innovator in our industry is unrivaled. It is truly an honor to have a legend like Bill in our company.”
This of course brings the mind to GPGPU tasks and if NVIDIA is considering an even stronger focus there, instead of raw gaming performance represented by David Kirk, and create other solutions specialized in other tasks than gaming. We will just have to wait and see what Dally will add to NVIDIA’s already quite broad portfolio.
No active posts found.