About NVIDIA
Type : Public Company
Listed : NASDAQ: NVDA
Founded: 1993
Location : United States of America, Santa Clara, California
Key Figures : Jen-Hsun Huang (CEO)
Industry : Semiconductors
Products : GPUs, chipsets
Turnover : 8.9 $bn (2009)
Net Income : $3.1M (2008)
Employees : More than 6,000 (2009)
Website : www.nvidia.com
NVIDIA is a leading manufacturer of graphics, media and communications processors and wireless media processors. NVIDIA is the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor that generates immersive, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices.
NVIDIA has a fables status, that is, it is a company that develops electronics on its own and orders the manufacture and production of silicon "on the side". Thus, NVIDIA's California facilities are the heart and foundation of the entire company: the main R&D facilities, the computing center, the company's debugging laboratories, and much more are located here.
Jen-Hsun Huang - Co-Founder, CEO & President Established NVIDIA in April 1993 and has been President, CEO and Board Member since its inception. Under his leadership, NVIDIA has become a leading company in programmable graphics technology.
Brief chronology:
1995 - release of NV1 - the first NVIDIA video adapter;
1998 - company relocation to Santa Clara;
1999 - release of NVIDIA Quadro - the world's first graphics processor for workstations;
2000 - acquisition of most of the bankrupt company 3dfx Interactive. Microsoft selects NVIDIA as GPU supplier for Xbox;
2002 - release of GeForce 4;
2003 - the company acquires a leading provider of graphics and multimedia technologies for wireless devices - Media Q;
2004 - delivery of the 300 millionth processor;
2006 - release of the GeForce 8800 line of video cards - the world's first graphics accelerators with DirectX 10 support;
2007 - announcement of CUDA technology for GeForce 8, Quadro and Tesla video adapters;
2008 - Acquisition of Ageia Technologies, developer of the PhysX physics engine.
Chronology of video adapters release:
NV1 - the first video adapter from NVIDIA;
RIVA 128 and RIVA 128ZX - support DirectX 5 and OpenGL 1;
RIVA TNT, RIVA TNT2 - support DirectX 6 and OpenGL 1;
GeForce 256 - DirectX 7, OpenGL 1;
GeForce 2 - DirectX 7 and OpenGL 1;
GeForce 3 - DirectX 8.0 and OpenGL 1.5;
GeForce 4 - partial support for DirectX 8.1, OpenGL 1.5;
GeForce FX line - DirectX 9, OpenGL 1.5;
GeForce 6 line - supports DirectX 9.0c, OpenGL 2.0;
GeForce 7 line - supports DirectX 9.0c, OpenGL 2.0;
GeForce 8 line - supports DirectX 10.0, OpenGL 2.1;
GeForce 9 line - supports DirectX 10.0, OpenGL 2.1;
GeForce 200 line - supports DirectX 10.0, OpenGL 2.1;
GeForce G100 line - supports DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.0.