How does a chip go from being an academic theory to a $10 billion R&D Project?
In: Technology
I don’t know specifically what someone does at Nvidia, but R&D can cover all sorts of things.
Let’s say you want to build a better mouse trap. You have an idea, you try it. It doesn’t work. So you tinker with that idea to see if you can make it work. You have to buy new bits of springs and wire and maybe wood or plastic. You take the time to test it, monitoring how many mice it catches. Maybe it doesn’t work at all and you have to start over, so more time is spent on developing a different way of catching a mouse. More materials are needed, too. Overall, your money is going to time (or a salary for a paid worker), materials, and so in.
In Nvidia’s case, it’s the same thing. Let’s say Nvidia knows they need to produce a chip that can do 10 billion calculations a second. But the current microchip in the GPU can only do 7 billion. But they also can’t just make a new CPU that’s 50% larger, it just won’t fit in the space provided. So they have to find new ways to make GPUs that are smaller but do more. It will take hundreds of people to make this happen. I imagine most of the money they spend is on salaries, with materials and new equipment as the next most expensive items.
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