The tumult during the past year caused Jen-Hsun Huang to re-prioritize, much like everyone else. But, unlike everyone else, NVIDIA continued to invest, increasing R&D investment and hiring more content technology people than ever before.

"We did exactly the right thing for exactly the right reasons," he said, even acknowledging that the company's financial performance was not anywhere close to what he hoped it would be. "This is about how to separate the game from the score."

During a discussion with Jon Peddie, Jen-Hsun cited a slew of new initiatives from the past 12 months demonstrating that NVIDIA knows where technology is headed and that it's making the right investments, from 3D Vision to CUDA to OpenCL to DirectCompute to PhysX. He also touched on a previous company called Keyhole Corporation that NVIDIA invested in that allowed people to type in an address and then flew them anywhere in the world to an image of the place. That company became Google Earth.

"Our purpose is to help cultivate and help inspire other companies' endeavors to create what likely will be one of the most important ecosystems of the world, the beacon that will take computing to the next level," he said.