NVIDIA

NVIDIA Corporation is a computer hardware manufacturer headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware.https://web.archive.org/web/20230604101401/https://investor.nvidia.com/investor-resources/faqs/default.aspx
==History==
Nvidia was founded on April 5, 1993,https://web.archive.org/web/20180701130728/http://www.nvidia.com/page/corporate_timeline.html by Jensen Huang, who previously served as the director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at AMD. The other co-founders were Chris Malachowsky, previously an electrical engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems, and Curtis Priem, previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at Sun Microsystems.
When the company was first founded, 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 funding huge R&D to solve massive computational problems. With only $40,000 invested, 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 officially went public on January 22, 1999.
In 1999, six years since first being founded Nvidia released the GeForce 256, 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 huge margin. With the company gaining much recognition, Nvidia won the rights to develop the graphics hardware for the Xbox, a game console by Microsoft, and received $200 million advance. However, it took a serious toll on the number of its top-class engineers that stalled other projects.
As the years went by, Nvidia began acquired other companies, including Exluna, MediaQ, iReady, ULI Electronics, and Hybrid Graphics between 2002 and 2005. Nvidia also helped develop the RSX graphics processor for the Sony PlayStation 3. By December 2006, Nvidia received subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice, regarding possible antitrust violations in the graphics card industry. By 2007, Nvidia acquired PortalPlayer and Ageia, which would help 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 were marred by manufacturing defects. Nvidia 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, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard. 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 litigations between the two companies.
By 2010, NVIDIA began to increase in popularity immensely due to various companies signing sponsorship and endorsement deals, mainly due to the part where Dell acquired Alienware to be its subsidiary company. Other known companies such as ASUS, MSI, Acer, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard, and various companies that focus on custom-built desktops or laptops entered the league to endorse with NVIDIA.
In November 2011, after initially unveiling the impending product at the Mobile World Congress, Nvidia released a 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 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 would 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 included cloud computing, autonomous driving, consumer devices, and Baidu's open-source AI framework PaddlePaddle. Baidu unveiled that Nvidia's Drive PX 2 AI would be the foundation of its autonomous-vehicle platform.
By late 2018, NVIDIA released the 2000 series GPUs that would feature ray-tracing technology. On March 11, 2019, Nvidia announced a deal to acquire 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 projected the new laptops 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 May 2020, Nvidia's top scientists developed an open-source ventilator in order to address the shortage resulting from the COVID-19 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 acquire Arm, a UK-based chip designer, for $32 billion.
On March 1, 2024, Nvidia became the third US company to close with a market capitalization exceeding $2 trillion, achieved this milestone in just 180 days, surpassing Apple and Microsoft, who took over 500 days to reach $2 trillion.https://web.archive.org/web/20240306100548/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-06/nvidia-ai-stocks-are-latest-trend-to-send-s-p-500-to-new-highs The company's highest market capitalization to date was $2.38 trillion, trailing only $230 billion behind Apple and $645 billion behind Microsoft.https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/nvidia-on-cusp-of-overtaking-apple-as-second-most-valuable-company/ar-BB1jzNhP?ocid=socialshare
Nvidia's market capitalization reached $3 trillion in June 2024, surpassing Microsoft and Apple, marking the company's world's most valuable achievement on June 18, 2024.https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-18/nvidia-becomes-world-s-largest-firm-as-ai-rally-steams-ahead?srnd=homepage-americas&sref=CIpmV6x8
==Product lineup==
*GeForce: Consumer-oriented graphics processing products that help accelerate display graphics, mainly in video games.
*Quadro: Consumer-oriented graphics processing products mainly used in workstations that accelerate certain programs for development.
==References==
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