NVIDIA – Company Overview, History, Products

Nvidia corporation is the most popular American multinational company which is famous for its manufacturing of graphical processing units (GPUs) and application programming interface (APIs) for gaming and high-performance stars on their semiconductor chips for mobile computing and automation. 

It has more than 20000 employees and it is currently headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is the top company when it comes to artificial intelligence using hardware and software lineups. The various applications of products developed by Nvidia include the use of GPUs in gaming, engineering, media, scientific research, manufacturing, and transportation.

Nvidia’s application programming interface is called CUDA which allows developers to create large parallel concurrent programs that utilize Nvidia’s GPUs for supercomputing. Nvidia has recently started reducing processors called Tegra for various smartphones and tablets by giving competition to AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and Graphcore.

The Nvidia GPU has always been famous for its performance in gaming and the Nvidia GPU lineup is called GeForce. In the year 2021 Nvidia generated a revenue of 26 billion dollars.

Nvidia Corporation – History

Nvidia was founded by Jensen Huang on April 5, 1993, who was working as a microprocessor designer at AMD, and Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Prime who were working as staff engineers and chief designers at a company called Sun Microsystems.

In its early time, the main focus for Nvidia was to develop the next version of computing using accelerated and graphics-based applications that generate a high sales value for the company.

In 1999, Nvidia launched its first GeForce 256 transformation and lighting to the consumer hardware which implemented video acceleration and rendering. Because of this graphic console, Nvidia got a contract from Microsoft’s Xbox to develop its graphics hardware for gaming. Nvidia also partnered with Sony in 2004 to help develop the processor in its Playstation 3 gaming console. Nvidia also acquired multiple companies at this time like MediaQ, Hybrid Graphics, iReady and ULI Electronics, and Ageia.

In 2011, Nvidia launched its Tegra 3 ARM CPU chip for smartphones which had the first ever quad-core processor, especially in a phone. Then in 2013, Nvidia launched its next version called Tegra along with the Nvidia shield, which was the popular Android gaming console using Nvidia’s own chip.

Then in 2016 Nvidia diversified its business strategies toward gaming, automation, and smartphones. It launched its first GPU lineup called the GeForce 10 series which included the GTX 1080 and 1070 which were capable of virtual reality and automation rendering.

Nvidia also partnered with a Chinese company Baidu for autonomous full self-driving software and AI frameworks for consumers in the year 2017. Then in March 2019, Nvidia officially acquired Mellanox Technologies for over 6.9 billion dollars to take a step in high-performance computing using RTX laptops. Also, Nvidia launched its new series of GeForce 30 GPU by using the new Ampere micro-architecture.

Then in 2020 due to coronavirus, there was a chip shortage problem all over the world due to which Nvidia officially announced a deal to buy the company ARM for 32 billion dollars but later the deal was canceled as it was against the UK’s competition and markets authorities.

Nvidia Corporation – Products and services

The various products and services provided by Nvidia are as follows:

GeForce: It is a GPU lineup series by Nvidia, especially for consumer and commercial graphics processing products.

Nvidia RTX: It is a professional graphics processing product for visual computing and rendering.

Tegra: Tegra is the most popular system on a chips series developed by Nvidia for its high-end mobiles and tablets for their graphics performance in games.

Tesla: It is a dedicated GPU device by Nvidia for high applications in automation and scientific manufacturing.

Nvidia Shield TV: It is gaming hardware that includes Shield portable, Shield tablet, and also the Shield Android TV as a part of the gaming console for the consumers.

Nvidia Grid: It is the set of hardware and software support services to allow virtualization and customizations for its GPUs.

nForce: It is a motherboard system as a chip developed by Nvidia and Intel, and AMD for their higher-end personal computers.

Wrapping Up:

Nvidia is one of the largest graphics processing and chip manufacturing companies in the world that specializes in artificial intelligence and high-end computing. Nvidia mainly focuses on three types of markets – gaming, automation, and graphics rendering.