Nvidia Corporation

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. It is a software and fabless company which designs graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interface (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia is a global leader in artificial intelligence 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 that allows the creation of massively parallel programs which utilize GPUs. They are deployed in supercomputing sites around the world. More recently, it 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 AMD, its competitors include Intel, 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 with its handheld game consoles Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and Shield TV and its cloud gaming service GeForce Now.

Nvidia announced plans on September 13, 2020, to acquire Arm from SoftBank, 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 who was previously the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at AMD; Chris Malachowsky, an engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems; and Curtis Priem, who was previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip 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 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 (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 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, 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 with the design of the graphics processor ( RSX) in the PlayStation 3 game console. 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 the U.S. Department of Justice regarding possible antitrust violations in the graphics card industry.

''Forbes'' 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 physics engine 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, 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, Nvidia released its Tegra 3 ARM system-on-a-chip 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-based handheld game console 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 GTX 1080 and 1070, based on the company's new Pascal microarchitecture. Nvidia claimed that both models outperformed its Maxwell-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 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 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 which will use Nvidia's Drive PX-series artificial intelligence platform for its autonomous vehicles. In July 2017, Nvidia and Chinese search giant Baidu 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 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 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 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 and RedCine-X Pro. In August 2019, Nvidia announced ''Minecraft RTX'', an official Nvidia-developed patch for the game ''Minecraft'' 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 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 to buy Arm, a UK-based chip designer, for $32 billion.

On September 1, 2020, Nvidia officially announced the GeForce 30 series based on the company's new Ampere microarchitecture.

On September 13, 2020, it was announced that Nvidia would buy Arm from SoftBank Group 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, England. 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 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 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 (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.

In September 2022, Nvidia announced its next-generation automotive-grade chip, Drive Thor.

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 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, 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, 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, professional visual computing graphics processing products (replacing Quadro)
* NVS, multi-display business graphics solution
* Tegra, a system on a chip 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 and, most recently, the Shield Android TV
* 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.
*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 device driver for its products without resorting to (clean room) reverse engineering.

Instead, Nvidia provides its own binary GeForce graphics drivers for X.Org and an open-source library that interfaces with the Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris kernels and the proprietary