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Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as nVIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as ''n''VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to early-mid 2000s. Though unofficial, second letter capitalization of NVIDIA, i.e. nVidia, may be found within enthusiast communities and publications. ( ) is an American multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware and based in Santa Clara,
California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...
. It is a software and
fabless Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. These foundries are typically, but not exclu ...
company which designs
graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mo ...
s (GPUs), application programming interface (APIs) for
data science Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a bro ...
and
high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multi ...
as well as
system on a chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memor ...
units (SoCs) for the
mobile computing Mobile computing is human–computer interaction in which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage, which allows for the transmission of data, voice, and video. Mobile computing involves mobile communication, mobile hardware ...
and automotive market. Nvidia is a global leader in
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...
hardware and software. Its professional line of GPUs are used in workstations for applications in such fields as architecture, engineering and construction, media and entertainment, automotive, scientific research, and manufacturing design. In addition to GPU manufacturing, Nvidia provides an API called
CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...
that allows the creation of massively parallel programs which utilize GPUs. They are deployed in
supercomputing A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instruction ...
sites around the world. More recently, it has moved into the
mobile computing Mobile computing is human–computer interaction in which a computer is expected to be transported during normal usage, which allows for the transmission of data, voice, and video. Mobile computing involves mobile communication, mobile hardware ...
market, where it produces Tegra mobile processors for smartphones and tablets as well as vehicle navigation and entertainment systems. In addition to AMD, its competitors include
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...
, Qualcomm and AI-accelerator companies such as Graphcore. Nvidia's GPUs are used for edge to cloud computing and supercomputers. Nvidia expanded its presence in the
gaming industry Gaming industry, game industry, or games industry may refer to: * Gambling industry ** Especially in reference to casinos ** Online gambling industry * Video game industry * Industry related to game A game is a structured form of play ...
with its
handheld game console A handheld game console, or simply handheld console, is a small, portable self-contained video game console with a built-in screen, game controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are smaller than home video game consoles and contain the cons ...
s Shield Portable,
Shield Tablet The Shield Tablet, later relaunched as the Shield Tablet K1, is a gaming tablet, developed by Nvidia and released on July 29, 2014. It was Nvidia's second portable gaming device that uses Android. Compared to the Shield Portable, the controller ...
, and
Shield TV The Nvidia Shield TV (Shield Android TV or just Nvidia Shield) is an Android TV-based digital media player produced by Nvidia as part of its Shield brand of Android devices. First released in May 2015, the Shield was initially marketed by Nvidia ...
and its
cloud gaming service Cloud gaming, sometimes called gaming on demand or gaming-as-a-service or game streaming, is a type of online gaming that runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user's device, or more colloquially, playing a game rem ...
GeForce Now. Nvidia announced plans on September 13, 2020, to acquire Arm from
SoftBank is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The Group primarily invests in companies operating in technology, energy, and financial sectors. It also runs the ...
, pending regulatory approval, for a value of US$40 billion in stock and cash, which would be the largest semiconductor acquisition to date. SoftBank Group will acquire slightly less than a 10% stake in Nvidia, and Arm would maintain its headquarters in Cambridge. On February 7, 2022, facing increased regulatory hurdles, Nvidia signaled that it was dropping its acquisition of Arm. The deal, which would have been the largest ever in the chip sector, was valued at $66bn at the time of its collapse.


History

Nvidia was founded on April 5, 1993, by Jensen Huang (CEO ), a Taiwanese-American
electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the ...
who was previously the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a
microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...
designer at AMD; Chris Malachowsky, an engineer who worked at
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...
; and Curtis Priem, who was previously a senior staff engineer and
graphics chip A video display controller or VDC (also called a display engine or display interface) is an integrated circuit which is the main component in a video-signal generator, a device responsible for the production of a TV video signal in a computin ...
designer at IBM and Sun Microsystems. In 1993, the three co-founders believed that the proper direction for the next wave of computing was accelerated or graphics-based computing because it could solve problems that general-purpose computing could not. They also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume. Video games became the company's flywheel to reach large markets and fund huge R&D to solve massive computational problems. With $40,000 in the bank, the company was born. The company subsequently received $20 million of venture capital funding from
Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...
and others. Nvidia initially had no name and the co-founders named all their files NV, as in "next version". The need to incorporate the company prompted the co-founders to review all words with those two letters, leading them to " invidia", the Latin word for "envy". Nvidia went public on January 22, 1999.


Releases and acquisitions

The release of the RIVA TNT in 1998, solidified Nvidia's reputation for developing capable graphics adapters. In late 1999, Nvidia released the
GeForce 256 The GeForce 256 is the original release in Nvidia's " GeForce" product-line. Announced on August 31, 1999 and released on October 11, 1999, the GeForce 256 improves on its predecessor ( RIVA TNT2) by increasing the number of fixed pixel pipeli ...
(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 Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...
's
Xbox Xbox is a video gaming brand created and owned by Microsoft. The brand consists of five video game consoles, as well as applications (games), streaming services, an online service by the name of Xbox network, and the development arm by th ...
game console, which earned Nvidia a $200 million advance. However, the project took many of its 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 December 2000, Nvidia reached an agreement to acquire the intellectual assets of its one-time rival
3dfx 3dfx Interactive was an American technology company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the field from the ...
, a pioneer in consumer 3D graphics technology leading the field from mid 1990s until 2000. The acquisition process was finalized in April 2002. 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. In December 2004, it was announced that Nvidia would assist
Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
with the design of the graphics processor ( RSX) in the
PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...
game console. On December 14, 2005, Nvidia acquired ULI Electronics, which at the time supplied third-party southbridge parts for
chipset In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components in one or more integrated circuits known as a "Data Flow Management System" that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. It is usually found on t ...
s to ATI, Nvidia's competitor. In March 2006, Nvidia acquired
Hybrid Graphics AMD Hybrid Graphics technology, is a collective brand from AMD for its Radeon line of discrete and integrated GPU, promoting higher performance and productivity while saving energy consumption in GPUs. The technology previously applied to sele ...
. In December 2006, Nvidia, along with its main rival in the graphics industry AMD (which had acquired ATI), received subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice regarding possible
antitrust Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust l ...
violations in the graphics card industry. ''
Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...
'' named Nvidia its ''Company of the Year'' for 2007, citing the accomplishments it made during the said period as well as during the previous five years. On January 5, 2007, Nvidia announced that it had completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc. In February 2008, Nvidia acquired Ageia, developer of the
PhysX PhysX is an open-source realtime physics engine middleware SDK developed by Nvidia as a part of Nvidia GameWorks software suite. Initially, video games supporting PhysX were meant to be accelerated by PhysX PPU ( expansion cards designed by ...
physics engine A physics engine is computer software that provides an approximate simulation of certain physical systems, such as rigid body dynamics (including collision detection), soft body dynamics, and fluid dynamics, of use in the domains of computer ...
and physics processing unit. Nvidia announced that it planned to integrate the PhysX technology into its future GPU products. In July 2008, Nvidia took a write-down of approximately $200 million on its first-quarter revenue, after reporting that certain mobile chipsets and GPUs produced by the company had "abnormal failure rates" due to manufacturing defects. Nvidia, however, did not reveal the affected products. In September 2008, Nvidia became the subject of a class action lawsuit over the defects, claiming that the faulty GPUs had been incorporated into certain laptop models manufactured by Apple Inc.,
Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...
, and HP. In September 2010, Nvidia reached a settlement, in which it would reimburse owners of the affected laptops for repairs or, in some cases, replacement. On January 10, 2011, Nvidia signed a six-year, $1.5 billion cross-licensing agreement with Intel, ending all litigation between the two companies. In November 2011, after initially unveiling it at
Mobile World Congress MWC Barcelona (formerly but still commonly referred to as Mobile World Congress) is an annual trade show organised by GSMA, dedicated primarily to the mobile communications industry. The event is held in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain at the ...
, Nvidia released its Tegra 3 ARM
system-on-a-chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memor ...
for mobile devices. Nvidia claimed that the chip featured the first-ever quad-core mobile CPU. 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 January 2013, NVIDIA unveiled the Tegra 4, as well as the Nvidia Shield, an
Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...
-based
handheld game console A handheld game console, or simply handheld console, is a small, portable self-contained video game console with a built-in screen, game controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are smaller than home video game consoles and contain the cons ...
powered by the new system-on-chip. On July 29, 2013, Nvidia announced that they acquired PGI from STMicroelectronics. In 2014, Nvidia ported Valve games Portal and Half Life 2 to its Nvidia Shield tablet as Lightspeed Studio. Since 2014, Nvidia has diversified its business focusing on three markets: gaming, automotive electronics, and mobile devices. On May 6, 2016, Nvidia unveiled the first GPUs of the
GeForce 10 series The GeForce 10 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, initially based on the Pascal microarchitecture announced in March 2014. This design series succeeded the GeForce 900 series, and is succeeded by the GeForce 16 ...
, the GTX 1080 and 1070, based on the company's new Pascal microarchitecture. Nvidia claimed that both models outperformed its
Maxwell Maxwell may refer to: People * Maxwell (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** James Clerk Maxwell, mathematician and physicist * Justice Maxwell (disambiguation) * Maxwell baronets, in the Baronetage o ...
-based Titan X model; the models incorporate GDDR5X and GDDR5 memory respectively, and use a 16 nm manufacturing process. The architecture also supports a new hardware feature known as simultaneous multi-projection (SMP), which is designed to improve the quality of multi-monitor and
virtual reality Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), e ...
rendering. Laptops that include these GPUs and are sufficiently thin – as of late 2017, under  – have been designated as meeting NVIDIA's "Max-Q" design standard. In July 2016, Nvidia agreed to a settlement for a
false advertising False advertising is defined as the act of publishing, transmitting, or otherwise publicly circulating an advertisement containing a false claim, or statement, made intentionally (or recklessly) to promote the sale of property, goods, or servic ...
lawsuit regarding its GTX 970 model, as the models were unable to use all of their advertised 4 GB of RAM due to limitations brought by the design of its hardware. In May 2017, Nvidia announced a partnership with
Toyota is a Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Toyota City, Aichi, Japan. It was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda and incorporated on . Toyota is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world, producing about 10 ...
which will use Nvidia's Drive PX-series artificial intelligence platform for its autonomous vehicles. In July 2017, Nvidia and Chinese search giant
Baidu Baidu, Inc. ( ; , meaning "hundred times") is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. It is one of th ...
announced a far-reaching AI partnership that includes cloud computing, autonomous driving, consumer devices, and Baidu's open-source AI framework PaddlePaddle. Baidu unveiled that Nvidia's Drive PX 2 AI will be the foundation of its autonomous-vehicle platform. Nvidia officially released the Titan V on December 7, 2017. Nvidia officially released the Nvidia Quadro GV100 on March 27, 2018. Nvidia officially released the RTX 2080 GPUs on September 27, 2018. In 2018,
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
announced that Nvidia's Tesla P4 graphic cards would be integrated into Google Cloud service's artificial intelligence. In May 2018, on the Nvidia user forum, a thread was started asking the company to update users when they would release web drivers for its cards installed on legacy Mac Pro machines up to mid-2012 5,1 running the macOS Mojave operating system 10.14. Web drivers are required to enable graphics acceleration and multiple display monitor capabilities of the GPU. On its Mojave update info website,
Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ances ...
stated that macOS Mojave would run on legacy machines with 'Metal compatible' graphics cards and listed Metal compatible GPUs, including some manufactured by Nvidia. However, this list did not include Metal compatible cards that currently work in
macOS High Sierra macOS High Sierra (version 10.13) is the fourteenth major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop operating system for Macintosh computers. macOS High Sierra was announced at the WWDC 2017 on June 5, 2017 and was released on September 25, 2017 ...
using Nvidia developed web drivers. In September, Nvidia responded, "Apple fully control drivers for Mac OS. But if Apple allows, our engineers are ready and eager to help Apple deliver great drivers for Mac OS 10.14 (Mojave)." In October, Nvidia followed this up with another public announcement, "Apple fully controls drivers for Mac OS. Unfortunately, Nvidia currently cannot release a driver unless it is approved by Apple," suggesting a possible rift between the two companies. By January 2019, with still no sign of the enabling web drivers, Apple Insider weighed into the controversy with a claim that Apple management "doesn't want Nvidia support in macOS". The following month, Apple Insider followed this up with another claim that Nvidia support was abandoned because of "relational issues in the past", and that Apple was developing its own GPU technology. Without Apple approved Nvidia web drivers, Apple users are faced with replacing their Nvidia cards with a competing supported brand, such as AMD Radeon from the list recommended by Apple. On March 11, 2019, Nvidia announced a deal to buy Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion to substantially expand its footprint in the high-performance computing market. In May 2019, Nvidia announced new RTX Studio laptops. The creators say that the new laptop is going to be seven times faster than a top-end MacBook Pro with a Core i9 and AMD's Radeon Pro Vega 20 graphics in apps like
Maya Maya may refer to: Civilizations * Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America ** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples ** Maya language, the languages of the Maya peoples * Maya (Ethiopia), a popu ...
and RedCine-X Pro. In August 2019, Nvidia announced ''Minecraft RTX'', an official Nvidia-developed patch for the game ''
Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before bein ...
'' adding real-time DXR ray tracing exclusively to the Windows 10 version of the game. The whole game is, in Nvidia's words, "refit" with path tracing, which dramatically affects the way light, reflections, and shadows work inside the engine. In May 2020, Nvidia's top scientists developed an
open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
ventilator in order to address the shortage resulting from the global coronavirus pandemic. On May 14, 2020, Nvidia officially announced their Ampere GPU microarchitecture and the Nvidia A100 GPU accelerator. In July 2020, it was reported that Nvidia was in talks with
SoftBank is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The Group primarily invests in companies operating in technology, energy, and financial sectors. It also runs the ...
to buy Arm, a UK-based chip designer, for $32 billion. On September 1, 2020, Nvidia officially announced the
GeForce 30 series The GeForce 30 series is a suite of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed and marketed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 20 series. The GeForce 30 series is based on the Ampere architecture, which feature Nvidia's second-generation ray t ...
based on the company's new
Ampere The ampere (, ; symbol: A), often Clipping (morphology), shortened to amp,SI supports only the use of symbols and deprecates the use of abbreviations for units. is the unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). One amp ...
microarchitecture. On September 13, 2020, it was announced that Nvidia would buy Arm from
SoftBank Group is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The Group primarily invests in companies operating in technology, energy, and financial sectors. It also runs the ...
for $40 billion, subject to the usual scrutiny, with the latter retaining a 10% share of Nvidia. In October 2020, Nvidia announced its plan to build the most powerful computer in
Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge beca ...
,
England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...
. Named Cambridge-1, the computer will employ AI to support healthcare research, with an expected completion by the end of 2020, at a cost of approximately £40 million. According to Jensen Huang, "The Cambridge-1 supercomputer will serve as a hub of innovation for the UK, and further the groundbreaking work being done by the nation’s researchers in critical healthcare and drug discovery." Also in October 2020, along with the release of
Nvidia RTX Nvidia GeForce RTX (Ray Tracing Texel eXtreme) is a professional visual computing platform created by Nvidia, primarily used for designing complex large-scale models in architecture and product design, scientific visualization, energy exploratio ...
A6000, Nvidia announced it is retiring its workstation GPU brand Quadro, shifting product name to Nvidia RTX for future products and the manufacturing to be Nvidia Ampere architecture based. In August 2021, the proposed takeover of Arm Holdings was stalled after the UK's Competition and Markets Authority raised "significant competition concerns". In October 2021, the
European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...
opened a competition investigation into the takeover. The Commission stated that Nvidia's acquisition could restrict competitors' access to Arm's products and provide Nvidia with too much internal information on its competitors due to their deals with Arm.
SoftBank is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The Group primarily invests in companies operating in technology, energy, and financial sectors. It also runs the ...
(the parent company of Arm) and Nvidia announced in early February 2022 that they "had agreed not to move forward with the transaction 'because of significant regulatory challenges'". The investigation is set to end on March 15, 2022. That same month, Nvidia was reportedly compromised by a cyberattack. The attack coincided with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, though there is no indication that the attack came from Russia or Russian hackers. In March 2022, Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang mentioned that they are open to having Intel manufacture their chips in the future. This was the first time the company mentioned that they would work together with Intel's upcoming foundry services. In April 2022, it was reported that Nvidia planned to open a new research center in
Yerevan, Armenia Yerevan ( , , hy, Երևան , sometimes spelled Erevan) is the capital and largest city of Armenia and one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities. Situated along the Hrazdan River, Yerevan is the administrative, cultural, and in ...
. In September 2022, Nvidia announced its next-generation automotive-grade chip,
Drive Thor Nvidia Drive is a computer platform by Nvidia, aimed at providing autonomous car and driver assistance functionality powered by deep learning. The platform was introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January 2015. An enha ...
. Following U.S. Department of Commerce regulations which placed an embargo on exports to China of advanced microchips, which went into effect in October 2022, Nvidia saw its data center chip added to the export control list. The next month, the company unveiled a new advanced chip in China, called the A800 GPU, that met the export control rules.


Finances

For the
fiscal year A fiscal year (or financial year, or sometimes budget year) is used in government accounting, which varies between countries, and for budget purposes. It is also used for financial reporting by businesses and other organizations. Laws in many ju ...
2020, Nvidia reported earnings of US$2.796 billion, with an annual revenue of US$10.918 billion, a decline of 6.8% over the previous fiscal cycle. Nvidia's shares traded at over $531 per share, and its market capitalization was valued at over US$328.7 billion in January 2021. For the Q2 of 2020, Nvidia reported sales of $3.87 billion, which was a 50% rise from the same period in 2019. The surge in sales and people's higher demand for computer technology. According to the financial chief of the company, Colette Kress, the effects of the pandemic will "likely reflect this evolution in enterprise workforce trends with a greater focus on technologies, such as Nvidia laptops and virtual workstations, that enable remote work and virtual collaboration."


GPU Technology Conference

Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC), now called Nvidia GTC, is a series of technical conferences held around the world. It originated in 2009 in
San Jose, California San Jose, officially San José (; ; ), is a major city in the U.S. state of California that is the cultural, financial, and political center of Silicon Valley and largest city in Northern California by both population and area. With a 2020 popul ...
, with an initial focus on the potential for solving computing challenges through GPUs. In recent years, the conference focus has shifted to various applications of artificial intelligence and deep learning, including: self-driving cars, healthcare,
high performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multi ...
, and Nvidia Deep Learning Institute (DLI) training. GTC 2018 attracted over 8400 attendees. GTC 2020 was converted to a digital event and drew roughly 59,000 registrants.


Product families

Nvidia's family includes graphics, wireless communication, PC processors, and automotive hardware/software. Some families are listed below: * GeForce, consumer-oriented graphics processing products *
Nvidia RTX Nvidia GeForce RTX (Ray Tracing Texel eXtreme) is a professional visual computing platform created by Nvidia, primarily used for designing complex large-scale models in architecture and product design, scientific visualization, energy exploratio ...
, professional visual computing graphics processing products (replacing Quadro) * NVS, multi-display business graphics solution * Tegra, a
system on a chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memor ...
series for mobile devices * Tesla, dedicated general-purpose GPU for high-end image generation applications in professional and scientific fields * nForce, a motherboard chipset created by Nvidia for Intel (Celeron, Pentium and Core 2) and AMD (Athlon and Duron) microprocessors * Nvidia GRID, a set of hardware and services by Nvidia for graphics virtualization * Nvidia Shield, a range of gaming hardware including the Shield Portable,
Shield Tablet The Shield Tablet, later relaunched as the Shield Tablet K1, is a gaming tablet, developed by Nvidia and released on July 29, 2014. It was Nvidia's second portable gaming device that uses Android. Compared to the Shield Portable, the controller ...
and, most recently, the
Shield Android TV The Nvidia Shield TV (Shield Android TV or just Nvidia Shield) is an Android TV-based digital media player produced by Nvidia as part of its Shield brand of Android devices. First released in May 2015, the Shield was initially marketed by Nvidi ...
* Nvidia Drive automotive solutions, a range of hardware and software products for designers and manufacturers of autonomous vehicles. The Drive PX-series is a high performance computer platform aimed at autonomous driving through deep learning, while Driveworks is an operating system for
driverless cars A self-driving car, also known as an autonomous car, driver-less car, or robotic car (robo-car), is a car that is capable of traveling without human input.Xie, S.; Hu, J.; Bhowmick, P.; Ding, Z.; Arvin, F.,Distributed Motion Planning for Sa ...
. * Nvidia BlueField, a range of Data Processing Units, initially inherited from their acquisition of Mellanox Technologies * Nvidia Datacenter/Server class CPU, codenamed Nvidia Grace, coming in 2023.


Open-source software support

Until September 23, 2013, Nvidia had not published any documentation for its advanced hardware, meaning that programmers could not write
free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
device driver In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and o ...
for its products without resorting to (
clean room A cleanroom or clean room is an engineered space, which maintains a very low concentration of airborne particulates. It is well isolated, well-controlled from contamination, and actively cleansed. Such rooms are commonly needed for scientif ...
)
reverse engineering Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompli ...
. Instead, Nvidia provides its own binary GeForce graphics drivers for X.Org and an open-source library that interfaces with the
Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
,
FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...
or Solaris kernels and the proprietary graphics software. Nvidia also provided but stopped supporting an obfuscated open-source driver that only supports two-dimensional hardware acceleration and ships with the X.Org distribution. The proprietary nature of Nvidia's drivers has generated dissatisfaction within 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 inadequate, given that competing manufacturers such as
Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...
offer support and documentation for
open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
developers and that others (like AMD) release partial documentation and provide some active development.An overview of graphic card manufacturers and how well they work with Ubuntu
Ubuntu Gamer, January 10, 2011 (Article by Luke Benstead)
Because of the closed nature of the drivers, Nvidia video cards cannot deliver adequate features on some platforms and architectures given that the company only provides x86/x64 and ARMv7-A driver builds. As a result, support for 3D graphics acceleration in Linux on
PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM ...
does not exist, nor does support for Linux on the
hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...
-restricted
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console. Some users claim that Nvidia's Linux drivers impose artificial restrictions, like limiting the number of monitors that can be used at the same time, but the company has not commented on these accusations. In 2014, with Maxwell GPUs, Nvidia started to require firmware by them to unlock all features of its graphics cards. Up to now, this state has not changed and makes writing open-source drivers difficult. On 12 May 2022, Nvidia announced that they are opensourcing their GPU kernel drivers. They are still maintaining closed source userland utilities, hence making users still dependent on their proprietary software.


Deep learning

Nvidia GPUs are used in deep learning, and accelerated analytics due to Nvidia's API
CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...
which allows programmers to utilize the higher number of cores present in GPUs to parallelize BLAS operations which are extensively used in
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...
algorithms. They were included in many Tesla vehicles before
Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The ...
announced at Tesla Autonomy Day in 2019 that the company developed its own SoC and full self-driving computer now and would stop using Nvidia hardware for their vehicles. These GPUs are used by researchers, laboratories, tech companies and enterprise companies. In 2009, Nvidia was involved in what was called the "big bang" of deep learning, "as deep-learning neural networks were combined with Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs)". That year, the Google Brain used Nvidia GPUs to create Deep Neural Networks capable of machine learning, where Andrew Ng determined that GPUs could increase the speed of deep-learning systems by about 100 times.


DGX

DGX is a line of supercomputers by Nvidia. In April 2016, Nvidia produced the DGX-1 based on an 8 GPU cluster, to improve the ability of users to use deep learning by combining GPUs with integrated deep learning software. It also developed Nvidia Tesla K80 and P100 GPU-based virtual machines, which are available through Google Cloud, which Google installed in November 2016.
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...
added GPU servers in a preview offering of its N series based on Nvidia's Tesla K80s, each containing 4992 processing cores. Later that year, AWS's P2 instance was produced using up to 16 Nvidia Tesla K80 GPUs. That month Nvidia also partnered with IBM to create a software kit that boosts the AI capabilities of
Watson Watson may refer to: Companies * Actavis, a pharmaceutical company formerly known as Watson Pharmaceuticals * A.S. Watson Group, retail division of Hutchison Whampoa * Thomas J. Watson Research Center, IBM research center * Watson Systems, make ...
, called IBM PowerAI. Nvidia also offers its own Nvidia Deep Learning software development kit. In 2017, the GPUs were also brought online at the Riken Center for Advanced Intelligence Project for
Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...
. The company's deep learning technology led to a boost in its 2017 earnings. In May 2018, researchers at the artificial intelligence department of Nvidia realized the possibility that a robot can learn to perform a job simply by observing the person doing the same job. They have created a system that, after a short revision and testing, can already be used to control the universal robots of the next generation. In addition to GPU manufacturing, Nvidia provides parallel processing capabilities to researchers and scientists that allow them to efficiently run high-performance applications.


Inception Program

Nvidia's Inception Program was created to support startups making exceptional advances in the fields of artificial intelligence and data science. Award winners are announced at Nvidia's GTC Conference. As of March 2018, there were 2,800 startups in the Inception Program. As of August 2021, Nvidia Inception has surpassed 8,500 members in 90 countries, with cumulative funding of $60 billion (USD).


2018 winners

* Subtle Medical (healthcare) * AiFi (enterprise) * Kinema Systems (autonomous vehicles)


2017 winners

* Genetesis (social innovation) * Athelas (hottest emerging) * Deep Instinct (most disruptive)


Controversies


Maxwell advertising dispute


GTX 970 hardware specifications

Issues with the GeForce GTX 970's specifications were first brought up by users when they found out that the cards, while featuring 4 GB of memory, rarely accessed memory over the 3.5 GB boundary. Further testing and investigation eventually led to Nvidia issuing a statement that the card's initially announced specifications had been altered without notice before the card was made commercially available, and that the card took a performance hit once memory over the 3.5 GB limit were put into use. The card's back-end hardware specifications, initially announced as being identical to those of the GeForce GTX 980, differed in the amount of L2 cache (1.75 MB versus 2 MB in the GeForce GTX 980) and the number of ROPs (56 versus 64 in the 980). Additionally, it was revealed that the card was designed to access its memory as a 3.5 GB section, plus a 0.5 GB one, access to the latter being 7 times slower than the first one. The company then went on to promise a specific driver modification in order to alleviate the performance issues produced by the cutbacks suffered by the card. However, Nvidia later clarified that the promise had been a miscommunication and there would be no specific driver update for the GTX 970. Nvidia claimed that it would assist customers who wanted refunds in obtaining them. On February 26, 2015, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang went on record in Nvidia's official blog to apologize for the incident. In February 2015 a class-action lawsuit alleging false advertising was filed against Nvidia and Gigabyte Technology in the U.S. District Court for Northern California. Nvidia revealed that it is able to disable individual units, each containing 256 KB of L2 cache and 8 ROPs, without disabling whole memory controllers. This comes at the cost of dividing the memory bus into high speed and low speed segments that cannot be accessed at the same time unless one segment is reading while the other segment is writing because the L2/ROP unit managing both of the GDDR5 controllers shares the read return channel and the write data bus between the two GDDR5 controllers and itself. This is used in the GeForce GTX 970, which therefore can be described as having 3.5 GB in its high speed segment on a 224-bit bus and 0.5 GB in a low speed segment on a 32-bit bus. On July 27, 2016, Nvidia agreed to a preliminary settlement of the U.S. class action lawsuit, offering a $30 refund on GTX 970 purchases. The agreed upon refund represents the portion of the cost of the storage and performance capabilities the consumers assumed they were obtaining when they purchased the card.


Async compute support

While the Maxwell series was marketed as fully
DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direc ...
12 compliant,http://international.download.nvidia.com/geforce-com/international/images/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti/nvidia-geforce-gtx-980-ti-directx-12-advanced-api-support.png Oxide Games, developer of '' Ashes of the Singularity'', uncovered that Maxwell-based cards do not perform well when async compute is utilized. It appears that while this core feature is in fact exposed by the driver, Nvidia partially implemented it through a driver-based shim, coming at a high performance cost. Unlike AMD's competing GCN-based graphics cards which include a full implementation of hardware-based asynchronous compute, Nvidia planned to rely on the driver to implement a software queue and a software distributor to forward asynchronous tasks to the hardware schedulers, capable of distributing the workload to the correct units. Asynchronous compute on Maxwell therefore requires that both a game and the GPU driver be specifically coded for asynchronous compute on Maxwell in order to enable this capability. The 3DMark Time Spy benchmark shows no noticeable performance difference between asynchronous compute being enabled or disabled. Asynchronous compute is disabled by the driver for Maxwell. Oxide claims that this led to Nvidia pressuring them not to include the asynchronous compute feature in their benchmark at all, so that the 900 series would not be at a disadvantage against AMD's products which implement asynchronous compute in hardware. Maxwell requires that the GPU be statically partitioned for asynchronous compute to allow tasks to run concurrently. Each partition is assigned to a hardware queue. If any of the queues that are assigned to a partition empty out or are unable to submit work for any reason (e.g. a task in the queue must be delayed until a
hazard A hazard is a potential source of harm. Substances, events, or circumstances can constitute hazards when their nature would allow them, even just theoretically, to cause damage to health, life, property, or any other interest of value. The probab ...
is resolved), the partition and all of the resources in that partition reserved for that queue will idle. Asynchronous compute therefore could easily hurt performance on Maxwell if it is not coded to work with Maxwell's static scheduler. Furthermore, graphics tasks saturate Nvidia GPUs much more easily than they do to AMD's GCN-based GPUs which are much more heavily weighted towards compute, so Nvidia GPUs have fewer scheduling holes that could be filled by asynchronous compute than AMD's. For these reasons, the driver forces a Maxwell GPU to place all tasks into one queue and execute each task in serial, and give each task the undivided resources of the GPU no matter whether or not each task can saturate the GPU or not.


GeForce Partner Program

The Nvidia GeForce Partner Program was a
marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to empha ...
program designed to provide partnering companies with benefits such as public relations support,
video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device to gener ...
bundling, and marketing development funds. The program proved to be controversial, with complaints about it possibly being an anti-competitive practice. First announced in a blog post on March 1, 2018, it was canceled on May 4, 2018.


Hardware Unboxed controversy

On December 10, 2020, Nvidia told popular
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tech reviewer Steven Walton of Hardware Unboxed that it would no longer supply him with GeForce Founders Edition graphics card review units. In a Twitter message, Hardware Unboxed said, "Nvidia have officially decided to ban us from receiving GeForce Founders Edition GPU review samples. Their reasoning is that we are focusing on rasterization instead of ray tracing. They have said they will revisit this 'should your editorial direction change.'" In emails that were disclosed by Walton from Nvidia Senior PR Manager Bryan Del Rizzo, Nvidia had said:
...your GPU reviews and recommendations have continued to focus singularly on rasterization performance, and you have largely discounted all of the other technologies we offer gamers. It is very clear from your community commentary that you do not see things the same way that we, gamers, and the rest of the industry do.
TechSpot, partner site of Hardware Unboxed, said, "this and other related incidents raise serious questions around journalistic independence and what they are expecting of reviewers when they are sent products for an unbiased opinion." A number of prominent technology reviewers came out strongly against Nvidia's move. Linus Sebastian, of Linus Tech Tips, titled the episode of his popular weekly WAN Show, "NVIDIA might ACTUALLY be EVIL..." and was highly critical of the company's move to dictate specific outcomes of technology reviews. The popular review site Gamers Nexus said it was, "Nvidia's latest decision to shoot both its feet: They've now made it so that any reviewers covering RT will become subject to scrutiny from untrusting viewers who will suspect subversion by the company. Shortsighted self-own from NVIDIA." Two days later, Nvidia reversed their stance. Hardware Unboxed sent out a Twitter message, "I just received an email from Nvidia apologizing for the previous email & they've now walked everything back." On December 14, Hardware Unboxed released a video explaining the controversy from their viewpoint. Via Twitter, they also shared a second apology sent by Nvidia's Del Rizzo that said "to withhold samples because I didn't agree with your commentary is simply inexcusable and crossed the line."


Improper disclosures about cryptomining

In 2018, Nvidia's chips became popular for cryptomining, the process of obtaining crypto rewards in exchange for verifying transactions on distributed ledgers, the SEC said. However, the company failed to disclose that it was a "significant element" of its revenue growth from sales of chips designed for gaming, the SEC further added in a statement and charging order. Those omissions misled investors and analysts who were interested in understanding the impact of cryptomining on Nvidia's business, the SEC emphasized. Nvidia, which did not admit or deny the findings, has agreed to pay $5.5 million to settle civil charges the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stated in May 2022.


See also

*
CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ...
* Fast approximate anti-aliasing *
General-purpose computing on graphics processing units General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...
* Nvidia G-Sync * Huang's law *
List of Nvidia 3D Vision Ready games Nvidia 3D Vision is a technology developed by Nvidia, a multinational corporation which specializes in the development of graphics processing units and chipset technologies for workstations, personal computers and mobile devices. This technology a ...
*
List of Nvidia graphics processing units This list contains general information about graphics processing units (GPUs) and video cards from Nvidia, based on official specifications. In addition some Nvidia motherboards come with integrated onboard GPUs. Limited/Special/Collectors' Editio ...
*
Molecular modeling on GPUs Molecular modeling on GPU is the technique of using a graphics processing unit (GPU) for molecular simulations. In 2007, NVIDIA introduced video cards that could be used not only to show graphics but also for scientific calculations. These card ...
* Nvision * GeForce * Nvidia Ion * Nvidia ShadowPlay *
OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-prog ...
* OptiX * Project Denver


Notes


References


External links

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