The way it's meant to be played
NVIDIA
Tagline
Net Worth
$328,000,000,000
Started in (City)
Delaware
Started in (Country)
United States of America
Incorporation Date
05th December, 1993
Bankruptcy Date
-
Founders
- Jensen Huang
- Curtis Priem
- Chris Malachowsky
About
Nvidia Corporation, a multinational technology company in America, was incorporated in Delaware and is currently situated in Santa Clara, California. It schemes the graphic processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets. And, also works over the system on a chip unit (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia developed its existence in the gaming industry with its handheld Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and Shield Android television. Its top GPU product line is identified as “GeForce” in direct competition with AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) “Radeon” products.
The company has varied its business since 2014, focusing on gaming, data centers, professional visualization, and auto. Now it is focusing on artificial intelligence. It has also moved into the mobile computing market, where the production of “Tegra” mobile processors for smartphones and tablets are prepared. The company is also engaged in producing entertainment and vehicle navigation systems and trying to compete with giants like Qualcomm and Intel in this industry.
Beginning
Nvidia Corporation was founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem on April 5, 1993. Jensen Huang is a Taiwanese American and a past director of CoreWare at LSI Logic. He also worked as a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in his past life. At the same time, Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky both worked at Sun's microsystem. Curtis Priem was a previous graphic chip designer and a senior staff engineer, whereas Chris Malachowsky worked as an electrical engineer.
The company had no name initially, so the co-founders named all the company files as 'NV,' which meant “next version.” But sooner, there was a requirement to merge the company leading the co-founders to review all the names using two letters, “NV,” which guided them to finally name the company, “Nvidia,” which was announced publicly on January 22, 1999.
In 1993, the co-founders decided that the appropriate direction for the next breakthrough in the company's portfolios should be speed or graphics-based computing, which will solve the issues that the general computing system cannot. They also observed that the most computational demanding problems were video games and expected it to result in huge sales. Thus, video games became the company’s wheels to reach a vast audience. And, all of this with Nvidia Corporation having just $40,000 in their account and on the way, later on, received $20 million of funds from Sequoia Capital and others.
Road to Success
Nvidia's reputation strengthened when the graphics adapters 'RIVA TNT' was developed in the year 1998. Along with the launch of the company's first consumer-level P.C. graphics chip, GeForce 256, on September 1, 1999. The chip was a huge success, landing the company a contract to develop the graphics hardware for Microsoft's Xbox game console and earn $200 million. Further, the company captured iReady, the high-performance Transmission Control Protocol provider, Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) offload solutions on April 22, 2004. In December 2004, it was disclosed that Nvidia would support Sony for the graphic processor designs (RSX) in PlayStation 3 game console. In 2006, Nvidia and its competitor, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), got the U.S. Department of Justice orders for possible antitrust violations in the Graphics Card Industry.
The company of the year title was given to Nvidia by Forbes, mentioning its achievements for the last five years to date. Early in the year 2007, Nvidia declared the completion of acquiring PortalPlayer. In February 2008, Nvidia procured Ageia, the originator of the PhysX physics engine and physics processing unit. The company also announced plans to merge the PhysX technology with its future GPU products.
Later in 2011, after launching the first instance at Mobile World Congress, Nvidia unleashed its Tegra3 ARM system-on-chip for portable devices. It testified that the chip starred the first quad-core mobile CPU and disclosed that Nvidia had agreed to procure Icera, a basic band chip-making company, for $367 million U.K. In January 2013, Nvidia launched Tegra 4 and the Nvidia Shield, an Android-based handheld game console backed by a new system-on-chip. In the same year, the company proclaimed the acquisition of PGI from STMicroelectronics.
Nvidia disclosed the first-ever GeForce 10 Series on May 6, 2016, the GPUs- GTX 1080 and 1070 based on the company's new Pascal microarchitecture. The company claimed that both the models performed the Titan X model, based on Maxwell. The models involved GDDR5X and GDDR5 memory, respectively, using a 16 nm manufacturing process. The formation is supported by the new hardware feature called SMP (simultaneous multi-projection), intended to improve the quality of multi-monitor and virtual reality interpretation. In late 2017, Portable computers that involved these GPUs were relatively thin, at about 20 mm- specially assigned to meet Nvidia's "Max-Q" design standard.
In July 2016, Nvidia agreed to settle a false advertising lawsuit involving its GTX 970 model since the model was incapable of using its advertised 4 G.B. of RAM because of the limitations fetched by the design of its hardware. Nvidia proclaimed the partnership with Toyota Motor Corporation in 2017, and Toyota used Nvidia's Drive PX-series artificial intelligence platform for its sovereign vehicles. Nvidia officially launched the NVIDIA TITAN V on December 7, 2017.
On March 27, 2018, Nvidia launched its Nvidia Quadro GV100. In the same year, the company also launched RTX 2080GPUs. Google broadcasted that Nvidia's Tesla P4 graphic cards will be unified into Google Cloud service's artificial intelligence.
In 2019, Nvidia proclaimed to purchase Mellanox Technologies for $ 6.9 billion substantively to extend its pace in the high-performance computing market. In May, new RTX Studio laptops were proclaimed by the company. As claimed by the inventor, the new device would have a speed of seven times faster than a top-end MacBook Pro, including Corei9 and AMD's Radeon Pro Vega 20 graphics in applications like RedCine-X Pro and Maya.
In May 2020, due to the global coronavirus pandemic, the scientists of Nvidia created an open-source ventilator to address the shortage. In May, the company officially proclaimed its Nvidia A100 GPU accelerator and the Ampere GPU microarchitecture. In July, it was reported about the meeting 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.
Nvidia claims its new RTX 3000 series of GPUs will be the "greatest generational leap" in its hardware to date. The RTX 3000 series will be released with the model 3070 beginning at US$499 on September 17, 2020, in the U.S.
Challenges
Nvidia Corporation had faced its own share of downfalls and challenges. In 2008, the company faced a Class action lawsuit which took a run-down of approximately $200 million on its first-quarter revenue. It was reported that certain mobile chipsets and GPUs produced by the company had manufacturing defects. Initially, the company did not declare the affected products, but in September 2008, Nvidia became subject to a lawsuit. In September 2010, a settlement was reached and led to Nvidia signing a six-year, $1.5 billion cross-licensing agreement with Intel to end all the litigations between the companies.
Similarly, Nvidia's GeForce Partner Program, a marketing program designed to reap its partnering companies with benefits, was ultimately termed to be an "anti-competitive" program. Then there was Apple/Nvidia web driver controversy, followed by Hardware unboxed controversy, and so on so forth.
Failures
There have been questions about Nvidia's chip failures, GPU failures, lawsuits, controversies, etc. But, over the years, the company has been focused and continued to work despite all the odds. Time and again, there have been questions raised about the company's products and its integrity, but its response has always been positive and forward-looking. For instance, when asked about its GPU and chipset failure problems, the following was the written response issued by the company, "NVIDIA uses industry-standard packaging material, and we have passed all industry-standard (JEDEC) components package qualifications. We stand behind our products, and we will continue to work with our partners to ensure the best visual experience."
Achievements
- "100 best companies to work for" - Fortune
- Best Places to work, Employer's choice, Glassdoor
- Most Innovative, Fast Company
- Top 50 smartest companies, MIT Tech review
- Best Performing CEOs, HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
- Best Corporate Citizens, JUST 100
- Best Green Company, Sustainability effect, Dow Jones
Subsidies
- Nvidia Advanced
- Rendering Centre
- Mellanox Technologies
- Arm Ltd.
CEOs
- Jensen Huang