Emmett Kilgariff

Vice President, GPU Architecture, NVIDIA
BSEE 1980

There was something Ed Delp said in a Purdue classroom one day that Emmett Kilgariff has never forgotten.

“As an engineer, you need to be constantly learning. If you’re not learning, you’re becoming a technician,” he recalls Delp, then a TA, saying. Delp is now the Charles William Harrison Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and has been a Purdue faculty member since 1984. “I took what he said to heart, and it made my career much more rewarding and exciting,” Kilgariff said.

Exciting is right. Kilgariff was on the ground floor of the graphics processing unit (GPU) revolution, starting with his days at 3dfx Interactive, one of the pioneers in graphics accelerators, where he was the vice president of architecture starting in 1997.

In 2000, he moved on to NVIDIA Corporation, where he is vice president of GPU architecture and has been directly responsible for about half of the company’s GPUs, including the RSX chip in the PlayStation 3, the computer chip in the Nintendo Switch and nearly every GeForce GPU in the last 23 years. NVIDIA’s GPU architectures power virtually all modern AI companies, from Google to Open AI.

“Some of the best GPU projects I worked on started with NVIDIA being at a competitive disadvantage, and we found ways to produce products that reestablished our leadership,” Kilgariff said.

At Purdue, he learned that “engineering is problem solving, and when things go bad, it’s an opportunity to solve problems.” He also values having learned the fundamentals through his lab experiences and internships, which, he said, “helped me prepare for an ever-changing role in industry.”

All told, he has more than 44 years of industry experience with expertise in high-performance computing, application-specific integrated circuits, software development, and AI/ML. He has been awarded more than 100 patents, including an apparatus and method for grouping texture cache requests.

In previous positions during the 1980s and ’90s, he worked in various high profile Silicon Valley firms, contributing to many different hardware design innovations. At Silicon Engineering, he worked with Microsoft on the Talisman project to build a groundbreaking new 3D graphics architecture. With Sun Microsystems, he designed graphics processors and medical imaging accelerators, and with Motorola, he developed embedded controllers for the industrial automation market.

When he was a student, “computer science as a major was in its infancy, computer graphics was just starting to be researched and AI was a pipe dream,” Kilgariff said. “The engineering, mathematic and critical thinking skills learned at Purdue were crucial in allowing me to continue to learn and adapt to an evolving technological world.”

His generosity to Purdue will live on for many years in the form of the Emmett Kilgariff Undergraduate Wing in the Max W. and Maileen Brown Hall of Electrical Engineering. His support also has made renovations possible in the undergraduate instructional lab, and he was honored with a 2013 Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer Award from the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

His recommendation for today’s students is to embrace engineering as a team sport. “Communication and collaboration are key to succeeding.”

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