Nvidia Corporation (/ɪnˈvɪdiə/ in-vid-eeə is an American worldwide technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia manufactures graphics processing units (GPUs), as well as system-on-a-chip units (SOCs) for the mobile computing market. Nvidia's primary GPU product line, labeled "GeForce", is in direct competition with AMD's "Radeon" products. Nvidia also joined the gaming industry with its handheld Shield Portable and Shield Tablet, as well as the tablet market with the Tegra Note 7.
In addition to GPU manufacturing, Nvidia provides parallel processing capabilities to researchers and scientists that allow them to efficiently run high-performance applications. They are deployed in supercomputing sites around the world. More recently, Nvidia has moved into the mobile computing market, where it produces Tegra mobile processors for smartphones and tablets, as well as vehicle navigation and entertainment systems. In addition to Advanced Micro Devices, its competitors include Inteland Qualcomm.
Founders and initial investment
Jen-Hsun Huang (CEO as of 2013), a Taiwanese-born American, previously Director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and amicroprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).Three people co-founded Nvidia in 1993:[9]
- Chris Malachowsky, an electrical engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems.
- Curtis Priem, previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at Sun Microsystems.
The founders received venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital.
Major releases and acquisitions
The autumn of 1999 saw the release of the GeForce 256 (NV10), most notably introducing on-board transformation and lighting(T&L) to consumer-level 3D hardware. Running at 120 MHz and featuring four pixel pipelines, it implemented advanced video acceleration, motion compensation, and hardware sub-picture alpha blending. The GeForce outperformed existing products by a wide margin.
Due to the success of its products, Nvidia won the contract to develop the graphics hardware for Microsoft's Xbox game console, which earned Nvidia a $200 million advance. However, the project drew the time of many of Nvidia's best engineers away from other projects. In the short term this did not matter, and the GeForce2 GTS shipped in the summer of 2000.
In 2000, Nvidia acquired the intellectual assets of its one-time rival 3dfx, one of the biggest graphics companies of the mid- to late-1990s.
In July 2002, Nvidia acquired Exluna for an undisclosed sum. Exluna made software rendering tools and the personnel were merged into the Cg project.
In August 2003, Nvidia acquired MediaQ for approximately US$70 million.
On April 22, 2004, Nvidia acquired iReady,also a provider of high performance TCP/IP and iSCSI offload solutions.
the year December 2004 saw the announcement that Nvidia would assist Sony with the design of the graphics processor (RSX) in thePlayStation 3 game console. In March 2006, it emerged that Nvidia would deliver RSX to Sony as an IP core, and that Sony alone would organize the manufacture of the RSX. Under the agreement, Nvidia would provide ongoing support to port the RSX to Sony's fabs of choice (Sony and Toshiba), as well as die shrinks to 65 nm. This practice contrasted with Nvidia's business arrangement with Microsoft, in which Nvidia managed production and delivery of the Xbox GPU through Nvidia's usual third-party foundry contracts. Meanwhile, in May 2005 Microsoft chose to license a design by ATI and to make its own manufacturing arrangements for the Xbox 360 graphics hardware, as had Nintendo for the Wii console (which succeeded the ATI-based Nintendo GameCube).
On December 14, 2005, Nvidia acquired ULI Electronics, which at the time supplied third-party southbridge parts for chipsets to ATI, Nvidia's competitor.
In March 2006, Nvidia acquired Hybrid Graphics.
In December 2006, Nvidia, along with its main rival in the graphics industry AMD (which had acquired ATI), received subpoenas from theU.S. Department of Justice regarding possible antitrust violations in the graphics card industry.
Forbes magazine named Nvidia its Company of the Year for 2007, citing the accomplishments it made during the said period as well as during the previous 5 years.
On January 5, 2007, Nvidia announced that it had completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc
In February 2008, Nvidia acquired Ageia Technologies for an undisclosed sum. Ageia developed the PhysX physics engine hardware and SDK.
In April 2009, a court consolidated multiple class action suits into one case, titled The NVIDIA GPU Litigation. NVIDIA agreed to replace faulty chips in or reimburse purchasers who already spent to get their laptop repaired. Nvidia also gave replacement laptops to many users in lieu of making a repair. The replacements and payments were not made until the settlement was finalized in 2011. Users were required to show proof of purchase and mail in their original faulty laptop. The chips were present in a number of Dell and HP laptops, as well as two Apple MacBook Pro models. Although the settlement cost Nvidia millions of dollars, many of the individuals were unhappy with the settlement, and multiple websites and blogs reflected this. The website entitled Fair Nvidia Settlement was one such site.
On January 10, 2011, Nvidia signed a six-year cross-licensing agreement with Intel, marking the end of all outstanding legal disputes between these two companies. According to the agreement, Intel agreed to pay Nvidia $1.5 billion in licensing fees in five annual installments.
On February 15, 2011, Nvidia announced and demonstrated the first quad-core processor for mobile devices at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It was announced that the chip was expected to ship with many tablets to be released in the second half of 2011,and the chip, dubbed the Tegra 3, was released on November 9, 2011.
In May 2011, it was announced that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Icera, a baseband chip making company in the UK, for $367 million in cash
On July 29, 2013, NVIDIA Corporation announced that they acquired PGI from STMicroelectronics.
On January 6, 2013, Nvidia introduced at CES 2013, the Tegra 4 mobile processor (codename "Wayne"), containing 72 GPU cores, a Quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU core, and LTE capability among its features.
On February 19, 2013, Nvidia announced the Tegra 4i (codename "Project Grey"), its first fully integrated 4G LTE mobile processor, featuring 5 times more GPU cores than Tegra 3, 1080p HD support, and Nvidia Chimera Computational Photography Architecture.
On January 6, 2014, Nvidia introduced at CES 2014, the Tegra K1 mobile processor (codename "Logan"), containing 192 GPU cores and a Quad ARM Cortex-A15 MPCore R3 + low power companion core (32-bit) or Dual-core Project Denver (64-bit). As of February 2014, Nvidia claims that the Tegra K1 outperforms both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 hardware.
source : en.wikipedia.org
source : en.wikipedia.org
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