HotChips 101

This post is almost a week overdue thanks to a hectic work week. In any event, I spent last Monday and Tuesday immersed in the high performance chip world at the 2009 HotChips conference.

Now, full disclosure: I am not electrical engineer, nor was I even formally trained in computer science. At best, I can “understand” a technical presentation in a manner akin to how my high school biology teacher explained his “understanding” of the Chinese language: “I know enough to get in trouble.”
But despite all of that, I was given a rare look at a world that few non-engineers ever get to see, and yet it is one which has a dramatic impact on the technology sector given the importance of these cutting-edge chip technologies in computers, mobile phones, and consumer electronics.

And, here’s my business strategy/non-expert enthusiast view of six of the big highlights I took away from the conference and which best inform technology strategy:

1. We are 5-10 years behind on the software development technology needed to truly get performance power out of our new chips. Over the last decade, computer chip companies discovered that simply ramping up clock speeds (the Megahertz/Gigahertz number that everyone talks about when describing how fast a chip is) was not going to cut it as a way of improving computer performance (because of power consumption and heat issues). As a result, instead of making the cores (the processing engines) on a chip faster, chip companies like Intel resorted to adding more cores to each chip. The problem with this approach is that performance becomes highly dependent on software developers being able to create software which can figure out how to separate tasks across multiple cores and share resources effectively between them – something which is “one of the hardest if not the hardest systems challenge that we as an industry have ever face” (courtesy of UC Berkeley professor Dave Patterson). The result? Chip designers like Intel may innovate to the moon, but unless software techniques catch up, we won’t get to see any of that. Is it no wonder, then, that Intel bought multi-core software technology company RapidMind or that other chip designers like IBM and Sun are so heavily committed to creating software products to help developers make use of their chips? (Note: the image to the right is an Apple ad of an Intel bunny suit smoked by the PowerPC chip technology that they used to use)
2. Computer performance may become more dependent on chip accelerator technologies. The traditional performance “engine” of a computer was the CPU, a product which has made the likes of Intel and IBM fabulously wealthy. But, the CPU is a general-purpose “engine” – a jack of all trades, but a master of none. In response to this, companies like NVIDIA, led by HotChips keynote speaker Jen-Hsun Huang, have begun pushing graphics chips (GPUs), traditionally used for gaming or editing movies, as specialized engines for computing power. I’ve discussed this a number of times over at the Bench Press blog, but the basic idea is that instead of using the jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none CPU, a system should use specialized chips to address specialized needs. Because a lot of computing power is burnt doing work that is heavy on the mathematical tasks that a GPU is suited to do, or the signal processing work that a digital signal processor might be better at, or the cryptography work that a cryptography accelerator is better suited for, this opens the doorway to the use of other chip technologies in our computers. NVIDIA’s GPU solution is one of the most mature, as they’ve spent a number of years developing a solution they call CUDA, but there was definitely a clear message: as the performance that we care about becomes more and more specialized (like graphics or number crunching or security), special chip accelerators will become more and more important.

1. Designing high-speed chips is now less and less about “chip speed” and more and more about memory and input/output. An interesting blog post by Gustavo Duarte highlighted something very fascinating to me: your CPU spends most of its time waiting for things to do. So much time, in fact, that the best way to speed up your chip is not to speed up your processing engine, but to speed up getting tasks into your chip’s processing cores. The biological analogy to this is something called a perfect enzyme – an enzyme that works so fast that its speed is limited by how quickly it can get ahold of things to work on. As a result, every chip presentation spent ~2/3 of the time talking about managing memory (where the chip stores the instructions it will work on) and managing how quickly instructions from the outside (like from your keyboard) get to the chip’s processing cores. In fact, one of the IBM POWER7 presentations spent almost the entire time discussing the POWER7’s use and management of embedded DRAM technology to speed up how quickly tasks can get to the processing cores.
2. Moore’s Law may no longer be as generous as it used to be. I mentioned before that one of the big “facts of life” in the technology space is the ability of the next product to be cheaper, faster, and better than the last – something I attributed to Moore’s Law (an observation that chip technology doubles in capability every ~2 years). At HotChips, there was a fascinating panel discussing the future of Moore’s Law, mainly asking the question of (a) will Moore’s Law continue to deliver benefits and (b) what happens if it stops? The answers were not very uplifting. While there was a wide range of opinions on how much we’d be able to squeeze out of Moore’s Law going forward, there was broad consensus that the days of just letting Moore’s Law lower your costs, reduce your energy bill, and increase your performance simultaneously were over. The amount of money it costs to design next-generation chips has grown exponentially (one panelist cited a cost of $60 million just to start a new custom project), and the amount of money it costs to operate a semiconductor factory have skyrocketed into the billions. And, as one panelist put it, constantly riding the Moore’s Law technology wave has forced the industry to rely on “tricks” which reduced the delivery of all the benefits that Moore’s Law was typically able to bring about. The panelists warned that future chip innovations were going to be driven more and more by design and software rather than blindly following Moore’s Law and that unless new ways to develop chips emerged, the chip industry itself could find itself slowing its progress.
3. Power management is top of mind. The second keynote speaker, EA Chief Creative Officer Richard Hilleman noted something which gave me significant pause. He said that in 2009, China will probably produce more electric cars in one year than have ever been produced in all of history. The impact to the electronics industry? It will soon be very hard to find and very expensive to buy batteries. This, coupled with the desires of consumers everywhere to have longer battery lives for their computers, phones, and devices means that managing power consumption is critical for chip designers. In each presentation I watched, I saw the designers roll out a number of power management techniques – the most amusing of which was employed by IBM’s new POWER7 uber-chip. The POWER7 could implement four different low-power modes (so that the system could tune its power consumption), which were humorously named: doze, nap, sleep, and “Rip van Winkle”.
4. Chip designers can no longer just build “the latest and greatest”. There used to be one playbook in the Silicon Valley – build what you did a year ago, but make it faster. That playbook is fast becoming irrelevant. No longer can Silicon Valley just count on people to buy bigger and faster computers to run the latest and greatest applications. Instead, people are choosing to buy cheaper computers to run Facebook and Gmail, which, while interesting and useful, no longer need the CPU or monitor with the greatest “digital horsepower.” EA’s Richard Hilleman noted that this trend was especially important in the gaming industry. Where before, the gaming industry focused on hardcore gamers who spent hours and hours building their systems and playing immersive games, today, the industry is keen on building games with clever mechanics (e.g. a Guitar Hero or a game for the Nintendo Wii) for people with short attention spans who aren’t willing to spend hours holed up in front of their televisions. Instead of focusing on pure graphical horsepower, gaming companies today want to build games which can be social experiences (like World of Warcraft) or which can be played across many devices (like smartphones or over social networks). With stores like Gamestop on the rise, gaming companies can no longer count on just selling games, they need to think up how to sell “virtual goods” (like upgrades to your character/weapons) or in-game advertising (a Coke billboard in your game?) or encourage users to subscribe. What this all means is that, to stay relevant, technology companies can no longer just gamble on their ability to make yesterday’s product faster, they have to make them better too.

There was a lot more that happened at HotChips than I can describe here (and I skipped over a lot of the details which non-technical people wouldn’t really be able to grasp), but those were six of the most interesting messages that I left the conference with, and I am wondering if I can get my firm to pay for another trip next year!

Oh, and just to brag, while at HotChips, I got to check out a demo of the potential blockbuster game Batman: Arkham Asylum while checking out NVIDIA’s 3D Vision product! And I have to say, I’m very impressed by both products – and am now very tempted by NVIDIA’s Buy a GeForce card, get Batman: Arkham Asylum free offer.

(Image credit: Intel bunny smoked ad) (Image credit: GPU computing power) (Image Credit: brick wall) (Image – Rip Van Winkle) (Image – World of Warcraft box art)

Capillary Calendar

This little gem of an idea was shared to me via Google Reader by my friend Cat of Pizza Diavola. Spanish designer Oscar Diaz took the usually boring concept of a calendar and came up with a way to really make it pop.
Through the power of capillary action (for you laypeople, what allows paper towels to soak up water), Diaz has created a calendar which slowly sucks up paint as the days in a month go by. The result? One hell of a calendar:

The full calendar has colors which “relate to a “color temperature scale”, each month having a color related to our perception of the weather on that month. The colors range from dark blue in December to three shades of green in spring or orange and red in the summer.”
It is apparently on display until October 11th at the Circulo de Bellas Artas in Madrid.
(Image credit)

Recruiting lessons

If the sudden increase in emails from my company’s recruiting staff are any indication, the recruiting season is back in full gear! For many, this will bring enormous amounts of stress, but it doesn’t have to be that way. For starters, I’ve posted a number of tips in the past about:

• How recruiting works
• Tips on how to survive the different phases of recruiting
• Being mindful that every interaction you have with a firm is carefully being monitored and studied
• Using social networking websites to your advantage

But, while I’ve focused a great deal in the past on advice for how to land a job you want, I’ve spent relatively little time talking about how to select a job. On that front, I have four tips:

1. Reputation matters. A lot.
2. Find out what people actually do. Including the bad parts.
3. Determine what sort of training and mentorship is available.
4. Understand the working environment.

The practical minded out there (this blogger has been guilty of this many times) will say, “I’ll worry about that after I get a few offers.” And, on some level, especially in college/business school, that is true. But, the fact of the matter is that recruiting is a very time consuming and tiring process. The cycle of going to company presentations, chatting up people who are constantly sizing you up, preparing resumes and cover-letters, and interviewing took up valuable time which I would have preferred to spend with my friends or on things of greater interest to me. Worse than the opportunity cost of spending all your time applying for jobs you’re not interested in, it can leave you in a position where you, at best, are apathetic towards an offer and, at worse, leave you in a place which can actually be detrimental to your professional development. Instead, I would advise that you focus very early on in narrowing your search so that you can tailor your resume’s, cover letter’s, and conversations to fit the firms you’d actually like working for.

1. Reputation matters. A lot: If there is one thing that I learned during my two years in consulting, it is that the reputation of a company is everything. While this may seem a bit obvious, I think what most people don’t understand is the magnitude of the impact that reputation can have. It dictates things ranging from the money that a firm can make for a particular engagement or project to what sorts of engagements a firm will get to handle. Some informal conversations that I’ve had revealed that firms with stronger reputations will not only land more interesting, longer-term engagements (e.g. multi-month strategy projects vs. 2-week fact-finding projects), but that for the same project, a firm with a strong reputation can charge significantly more (I’ve heard gues-timates of pricing varying by over 50% between top-tier/specialist firms and second-tier shops). When you also consider the weight that the reputation of your previous employers has when you’re looking for new jobs (there are quite a few private equity/venture capital firms that require applicants to be from top-tier banks/consulting firms), it should become pretty clear that the reputation should be a very important consideration.

To be 100% clear, this doesn’t mean that you should only focus your time on “big name” companies. After all, while McKinsey is a great consulting firm, they may not get you where you want to go if you’re interested in PR or marketing or even in a specific type of consulting, like IT, or a specific industry expertise. What it does mean is that you should figure out what you want to build credibility around and find companies which can help you do that. This will help you develop your own skills and capabilities and position you well for the next job.

2. Find out what people actually do. Especially the bad parts. The recruiting process is as much a process for companies to find out more about their applicants, as it is a process for prospective applicants to find out more about the firm. This means that you shouldn’t be the only one answering tricky questions.

While you can ask direct questions like “what do you do?”, “how much travel do you do?”, and “what sort of hours do you work?”, you should be aware that any firm with a half-decent recruiting process will have already prepped its people with answers to those questions. While those answers won’t be outright lies, they are oftentimes couched in “spin” to mask un-pleasantries about the job and are generally too unspecific to help you understand what you really need to know about a job to determine if you like it (or, perhaps more correctly, if the rewards outweigh the bad aspects of the job).

Instead, ask strategic (“tricky”) questions, like:

• What were you doing last week/month/yesterday at work? (More difficult to “apply spin” when you’re trying to recall something specific)
• What do you do for fun outside of work? (Indirect way to get a sense of what sort of control people have over their work-life balance)
• If you could change one or two things about your job, what would they be?
• What was your best day at work? (Get a sense of what sort of on-the-job rewards, responsibilities, and recognition are possible)
• What was your worst day at work? (High probability of “spin” in the answer, but still valuable to understand)
• How many people stay at the firm for longer than 3 years? Why? Where do they go? (Good measure of whether or not people like the job and why)
• Where do most of your non-college recruits come from? (A good way to assess what sort of person fits in and what sort of skills the firm can help you develop)

3. Determine what sort of training and mentorship is available. Success in your career is highly dependent on what sort of skills you can pick up over time and what sort of opportunities you choose to pursue. To that end, understanding what sort of formal training programs are available and how the firm’s more senior members think about mentoring is something that should be on top of every recruit’s mind.

I personally did not even think about mentorship when I did recruiting in college, so I am very lucky that I wound up at a firm with a wide range of training programs and where partners and managers place emphasis on providing advice and coaching to more junior folk. This sort of luck is not something you (or I) should ever count on, and I would highly advise you to find out:

• Does the firm have ongoing training programs throughout an employee’s career? What sort of training? (Or are there just introductory programs at the start of employment and routine training on rules?)
• Who conducts the training? (This can help establish whether or not the firm values training and mentorship enough to take senior staff away from their day jobs to do it, or whether or not training is an after-thought)
• Who do individuals at the firm turn to for advice about their careers? (Is management willing and able to help their workers?)
• Does the company let employees switch between different roles/divisions? (This is usually a good sign that the firm cares about developing its people by exposing them to more things)

4. Understand the working environment. There are a lot of little things which really can impact how you feel about a job. The challenge is identifying these things. Below, I’ve attached a list of things which I didn’t realize would matter to me so much:

• Dress – Being required to wear a suit and a tie every day would be a nightmare for me, and so I am fairly grateful that my firm only requires me to dress semi-formally.
• Location – I love the Bay Area. If you want me to work for you, you better be in the Bay Area.
• Food – I strongly believe that offices should have breakfast cereal available. Some of my coworkers could pass on breakfast cereal, and complain that we don’t have enough in-office lunches. To each their own.
• Face-time – Some people (like this blogger) would rather leave the office early to work from home, while some people want work to be only conducted in the office. And some people would rather not show up at all. Understanding where you lie on that spectrum and where the company you’re interested in working at lies on that spectrum is important.
• Non-business Internet use – Consulting hours are very variable. Some days you’ll be in a rush all day. Some days you’ll have nice valleys of work intensity. As a result, at least at the firm I work at, nobody really minds if you’re on YouTube or Facebook or an RSS reader, as long as you get your work done on time. Some companies do mind. I don’t think I could work for one of those.
• Socializing at work – Different firms have different approaches to socializing at work. And sometimes, within the same firm, different divisions and groups have different unofficial policies on socializing. If you are the type of person who can’t socialize at work (or stomach other people socializing while you’re working), then you definitely need to know these things.
• Parties – Are company parties loud and crazy? Or soft and subdued? Are employees friends outside of work?
• Start/End of day – Some companies have no set start time. Other companies expect you in by 8 AM. Other companies don’t mind as long as you’re in by 10 AM. Depending on how far you plan to live from the office and how late you wake up, this may be an important criteria.

These are just a few examples of things to ask about. What’s important is that you consider what sort of working environment you need to be productive, and find out whether or not the firm you’re talking to can deliver that environment. If they can’t, then it doesn’t really matter how much you like the company: if you’re unproductive, your career will suffer.

Hopefully these four tips help are helpful for people pursuing recruiting. Anyone else have any other tips on how to identify companies that fit you?

(Image credit – Freaking News) (Image credit – gossip) (Image Credit – Mentor)

Worried about Google owning all of your data?

Although I’ve spoken at lengths about my love for Google, I am sensitive to privacy concerns that more and more people are having that Google just knows too much about me.

Thankfully, the brilliant thinkers over at Google have created a new option to help those who are nervous about Big Brother Google:

(Yes, it’s from the Onion, so it is a parody)

The Essays of the Oracle of Omaha

I recently finished reading The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America, a great collection of some of multibillionaire Warren Buffett’s greatest writings on business as collected and introduced by Lawrence Cunningham, and would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know a bit more about investing or business or both.

The book is organized into 8 “chapters”, with each chapter containing a series of excerpts from Warren Buffett’s writings, which as far as I can tell are mostly from the annual reports that Warren Buffett prepares for his company Berkshire Hathaway (I wonder if he writes personal financial reports…). The chapters discuss Buffett’s views on a number of topics, ranging from corporate governance to mergers and acquisitions to accounting to discussions of how investing should work.

Reading the book will give you an interesting look at the mind of one of the most successful investors of all time, but while I valued that insight, I think I was most impressed by three things:

1. I was amazed at how approachable and “folksy” Buffett’s writings are. Instead of relying on complex jargon and consultant-speak, he speaks in plain English, oftentimes using funny analogies or stories (and sometimes even Biblical/literary parables) or extremely nerdy puns to make very simple points. Case in point, to explain the irrationality of some companies who seem to always pursue that “one magical acquisition” which will take them to success, Buffet writes:
   

   “In the past, I’ve observed that many acquisition-hungry managers were apparently mesmerized by their childhood reading of the story about the frog-kissing princess. Remembering her success, they pay dearly for the right to kiss corporate toads, expecting wondrous transfigurations. Initially, disappointing results only deepen their desire to round up new toads. Ultimately, even the most optimistic manager must face reality. Standing knee-deep in unresponsive toads, he then announces an enormous ‘restructuring charge’. In this corporate equivalent of a Head Start program, the CEO receives the education, but the stockholders pay the tuition.”

2. I was impressed at how consistent Buffett has been. It’s rare to find a politician, let alone a businessman, who has had the consistency of values and strategy that Buffett has had. You can take any essay from any chapter of this book, regardless of when it’s from, and, other than mentions of specific years or specific political/cultural references, you would not be able to tell what year that essay had been written. His core message and beliefs on corporate governance, mergers & acquisitions, and especially his investment philosophy have not changed.
3. I was especially impressed at Buffett’s humility. Most executives seem to always desperately crave the spotlight and credit for positive things which have little to do with them and to deflect blame for things which are. I can’t fault them for that, as their salaries and jobs are highly dependent on the perception that they are capable stewards who do not make mistakes. But, Buffett takes a different approach. In many an essay about Berkshire Hathaway’s success, Buffett attributes the credit to the managers of the businesses Berkshire owns, oftentimes noting that his job is only to pick good businesses to own and that it is the managers and the businesses themselves that drive success. In essays about Buffett’s missteps, he freely owns up to them. In multiple essays, he has owned up to holding on to his textile business for too long or not exiting General Re’s derivatives business fast enough. Buffett even goes so far as to explain mistakes that he had made which nobody outside of Berkshire’s leadership team would know about (i.e. investment opportunities he could have made but passed on).

While I definitely learned a great deal about business and how Buffett thinks of the market, I think the most important learning that I took away from the book is what Buffett calls the “Noah principle”, and it is something I will aim to try to adhere to for the rest of my life:

“Predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.”

(Image credit – Book cover from Amazon)

Hot Chips

I’m very excited that I’ll be attending the 2009 Hot Chips conference which is being held from August 24-25. It’s a conference which is sponsored by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and has been held at Stanford ever since it began in 1989. What’s especially cool for people interested in technology or technology strategy is that it brings together the best and most innovative of chip designers and computer scientists to one place to showcase the newest and best in new chip designs and computer technologies.

This year is especially exciting as the two keynotes will be Jen-Hsun “I said ‘open a can of whoop-ass’ at an investors meeting” Huang, CEO and founder (and fellow Taiwanese) of graphics chip company NVIDIA, who will discuss the growing industry trend towards using graphics chips for computing power, and game supercompany EA’s Chief Creative Officer Rich Hilleman who will discuss what new computer technology can do for the game industry.

But even beyond the keynotes, I am also looking forward to the discussions on Intel’s new and potentially game-changing Moorestown platform (for their big mobile internet device/smartphone push), NVIDIA’s Ion platform (which brings Windows 7 and gaming capability to netbooks), startup SiliconBlue’s new FPGA products for phones, and a broad discussion on whether or not we’re hitting an end to Moore’s Law and its ability to drive new semiconductor technology advances.

A more detailed program is available on the website (Day One and Day Two). They’re now past early-bird registration, but if you’re at all interested about what will drive the next generation of technological innovation, you should definitely be at this conference!

“Creative” Marketing

I’ve criticized Singapore-based Creative before for overhyping their Zii chip with their vague promises like “stem-cell computing” and a name that eerily conjures up a very popular game console from Nintendo (here and here) .

Well, the hype keeps coming, they have now released specs for their first “stem cell computer” (whatever that means), a mobile internet device called the Zii EGG (pictured below)

The Zii EGG will run their special “Plaszma platform” (apparently a custom Linux-based operating system that is “stem cell computing”-enabled) and supports a “Zii-optimized” version of Google’s Android operating system.

To be fair, the device does look pretty cool and does promise support for many of the things that you would expect a hot mobile device to do, like:

• Multi-Touch display
• High-definition video
• 3D graphics
• “Full” desktop browsing
• Accelerometer
• WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS

But, really, Creative, why is it necessary to generate all this unnecessary verbiage and meaningless marketing blitz drivel around “stem cell computing”? If your product really does what you say it can, it should stand fine in the marketplace without this ridiculous (not to mention scientifically unfounded) hype. And, if it can’t, no amount of hype is going to save this from bombing.

(Image credit – Zii.com)