Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA pronounced /ɛnˈvɪ.di.ə/ ) is a multinational corporation which specializes in the development of graphics processing units and chipset technologies for workstations, personal computers, and mobile devices. Based in Santa Clara, California, the company has become a major supplier of integrated circuits (ICs) such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and chipsets used in graphics cards, and of video-game consoles and personal-computer motherboards.
Notable Nvidia product-lines include the GeForce series for gaming, the Quadro series for computer-aided design and for digital content creation on workstations, and the nForce series of integrated motherboard chipsets.
Company history
Three people co-founded Nvidia in 1993:
- Curtis Priem, previously a senior staff engineer and graphics-chip designer at Sun Microsystems
- Chris Malachowsky, an electrical engineer who also worked at Sun Microsystems
- Jen-Hsun Huang (currently CEO), previously Director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
The founders gained venture-capital funding from Sequoia Capital.
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.
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 and on January 5, 2007, it announced that it had completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc.
In December 2006 Nvidia, along with its main rival in the graphics industry AMD (which acquired ATI), received subpoenas from the Justice Department 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.
In February 2008 Nvidia acquired Ageia Technologies for an undisclosed sum. "The purchase reflects both companies shared goal of creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences", said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia. "By combining the teams that created the world's most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce-accelerated PhysX to twelve million gamers around the world." (The press-release made no mention of the acquisition-cost nor of specific products.)
Branding
The company's name combines an initial n — a letter usable as a pronumeral in mathematical statements — and the root of video — from Latin videre , "to see", thus implying "the best visual experience" or perhaps "immeasurable display". The sound of the name NVIDIA suggests "envy" (Spanish: envidia ; Latin, Italian, or Romanian: invidia ); and Nvidia's GeForce 8 series product uses the slogan "Green with envy". The company-name appears entirely in upper-case ("NVIDIA") in the company's technical documentation.
Products
Nvidia's product-portfolio includes graphics-processors, wireless-communications processors, PC platform (motherboard core-logic) chipsets, and digital-media-player software. The community of computer users arguably has come to know Nvidia best for its "GeForce" product-line, which not only offers a complete line of "discrete" graphics chips found in AIB (add-in-board) video cards, but also provides a core-technology in both the Microsoft Xbox game console, Sony PS3 game console, and nForce motherboards.
In many respects Nvidia resembles its competitor ATI: both companies began with a focus in the PC market and later expanded their activities into chips for non-PC applications. Nvidia does not sell graphics boards into the retail market, instead focusing on the development of GPU chips. As a fabless semiconductor company, Nvidia contracts out chip-manufacturing to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. (TSMC). As part of their operations, both ATI and Nvidia create "reference designs" (circuit-board schematics) and provide manufacturing samples to their board-partners. Manufacturers of NVIDIA video cards include BFG, EVGA, Foxconn, and PNY. The manufacturers Palit, XFX, ASUS, ECS, Gigabyte Technology, and MSI produce both ATI and NVIDIA cards.
December 2004 saw the announcement that NVIDIA would assist Sony with the design of the graphics processor (RSX) in the PlayStation 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 will 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 is a departure from 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, Microsoft has chosen to license a design by ATI and make their own manufacturing arrangements for Xbox 360's graphics hardware, as has Nintendo for their Wii console to succeed the ATI-based GameCube.)
On February 4, 2008, Nvidia announced plans to acquire physics-software producer AGEIA, whose PhysX physics engine program formed part of hundreds of games shipping or in development for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, and gaming PCs. This transaction completed on February 13, 2008 and efforts to integrate PhysX into the GeForce 8800's CUDA system began.
On June 2, 2008 Nvidia officially announced its new Tegra product-line. The Tegra, a System-on-a-Chip (SoC), integrates an ARM CPU, GPU, northbridge and southbridge onto a single chip. Commentators opine that Nvidia will target this product at the smart-phone and mobile Internet device markets.
Graphics chipsets
- NV1: Nvidia's first product, based on quadratic surfaces
- RIVA 128 and RIVA 128ZX: DirectX 5 support, OpenGL 1 support, Nvidia's first DirectX-compliant hardware
- RIVA TNT, RIVA TNT2: DirectX 6 support, OpenGL 1 support; the series that made Nvidia a market-leader
- Nvidia GeForce: desktop-graphics acceleration-solutions
- Nvidia Quadro: high-quality workstation solutions
- Nvidia Tesla: dedicated GPGPU processing for high-performance computing systems
- Nvidia GoForce: media processors for PDAs, Smartphones, and mobile phones featuring nPower technology
- Nvidia Tegra: System-on-a-chip with an ARM processor developed by NVIDIA for mobile devices such as smartphones, PDAs and MIDs
- GPU for game consoles
- Xbox GeForce 3: class GPU (on an Intel Pentium III/Celeron platform)
- PlayStation 3: RSX 'Reality Synthesizer'
Motherboard chipsets
- nForce series
- nForce (AMD Athlon/Duron K7 line)
- nForce2 (AMD Athlon/Duron K7 line, SPP (system platform processor) or IGP (Integrated Graphics Platform) and MCP (Media and Communications Processor); also features SoundStorm)
- nForce3 (AMD Athlon 64/Athlon 64 FX/Opteron, MCP only)
- nForce4 (AMD Athlon 64/Athlon 64 X2/Athlon 64 FX/Opteron, MCP only;Intel Pentium 4/Pentium D, SSP + MCP)
- nForce 500 (AMD Athlon 64 FX/Athlon 64 X2/Athlon 64/Sempron or Intel Core 2 Extreme/Core 2 Duo/Pentium 4/Celeron D/Pentium D)
- nForce 600 (AMD Quad FX or Intel Core 2 Quad/Core 2 Extreme/Core 2 Duo/Pentium 4/Celeron D/Pentium D)
- nForce 700 (Intel Core 2 and AMD Phenom)
Documentation and drivers
Nvidia does not publish the documentation for its hardware, meaning that programmers cannot write appropriate and effective open-source drivers for Nvidia's products (compare Graphics hardware and FOSS). Instead, Nvidia provides its own binary GeForce graphics drivers for X.Org and a thin open-source library that interfaces with the Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris kernels and the proprietary graphics-software. Nvidia also supports an obfuscated open-source driver that only supports two-dimensional hardware acceleration and ships with the X.Org distribution. Nvidia's Linux support has promoted mutual adoption in the entertainment, scientific visualization, defense and simulation/training industries, traditionally dominated by SGI, Evans & Sutherland and other relatively costly vendors.
The proprietary nature of Nvidia's drivers can generate dissatisfaction within the free-software communities. Some Linux and BSD users insist on using only open-source drivers, and regard Nvidia's insistence on providing nothing more than a binary-only driver as wholly inadequate, given that competing manufacturers (like Intel) offer support and documentation for open-source developers, and that others (like ATI) release partial documentation. Because of the closed nature of the drivers, Nvidia video cards do not deliver adequate features on several platforms and architectures, such as FreeBSD on the x86-64 architecture and the other BSD operating systems on any architecture. Support for three-dimensional graphics acceleration in Linux on the PowerPC does not exist; nor does support for Linux on the hypervisor-restricted PlaySta
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