The American technology multinational Nvidia Corporation is headquartered in Santa Clara and registered in the state of Delaware ,It involves a software publisher and a company called "Fabless" that develops graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing (HPC), as well as system on a chip (SoC) for the mobile computing and automotive markets.
Nvidia is a leading provider of artificial intelligence hardware and software. Its professional-grade GPUs are used in workstations for applications in a variety of industries, including architecture, engineering and construction, media and entertainment, the automotive industry, scientific research, and product design.
Nvidia is a "fabless" company, which means that it develops its products in research facilities but outsources their manufacturing to other semiconductor companies.
AMD (formerly ATI), Intel, and Qualcomm are its main rivals.
Jensen Huang (en), formerly employed by LSI Logic and AMD (as a microprocessor designer), is currently PDG; Chris Malachowsky (en), formerly employed by Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, is currently vice-president; and Curtis Priem (en), formerly employed by Sun Microsystems, is currently director of technical operations.
The company is known as Nvidia, and its logo is a stylized eye in shades of green and white. The company maintains its startup status until the years 1997 and 1998, when it starts to gain momentum and gradually emerges as a significant player on the market for graphics processors, particularly with the introduction of Riva for PC graphics cards.
The company is also well-known due to its "cameleon-mark" emblem.
Nvidia and ST Microelectronics signed their first strategic partnership agreement in 1994 :
The company launches its first pen graph in 1995, the NV1, which will have a very limited degree of success. Because of her "all-in-one" feature (a 2D/3D "potable" game console with audio emulation and a Sega pad controller), as well as the fact that Windows 95 is her only target operating system, Additionally, there were issues with the puce's own technology. For instance, the Quadratic Texture Map (QTM), a type of technology used to optimize for 3D, required specific programming, which was never truly used due to Nvidia's lack of notoriety at the time. Instead, the technology was bridged by the PCI bus.
Because it was based on the QTM as well, the NV2 was never released, and Nvidia choose to drop it in favor of focusing on the next generation of ponies.
The company launches the RIVA 128 (en), a graphic pen (NV3 code name), in the fall of 1997. Numerous OEM then decide to use this card after being drawn in by the idea of everything working together as one that the NV1 had overcome. Despite everything, Nvidia behind 3dfx and ATi
The release of the RIVA 128 ZX in April 1998, which has twice the memory of the RIVA 128 and an AGP 2 connector, propels the company to the forefront of the industry , She also signs a partnership agreement with the Taiwanese company TSMC, Nvidia released the Riva TNT in September 1998, however despite their promises, it is still inferior to 3dfx's Voodoo 2.
The company officially entered the NASDAQ market in January 1999. The Puce RIVA TNT2 (en)[24] debuts in the spring of 1999, followed by the GeForce 256 in the fall, which is the first widely available video card capable of handling all graphic calculations. She sold 10 million pounds of ponies in May.
Nvidia defeats its rival 3dfx :
In 2000, Nvidia acquires its rival 3dfx, who was then the industry leader in this sector but failed, It is scheduled to debut in spring 2000 as GeForce 2 GTS. The GeForce 2 MX and GeForce 2 Ultra are the entry-level and high-end versions of the GeForce 2 that were released in the fall of 2000. All graphics processors will be sold starting on this date under the GeForce brand.
ATi releases its Radeon 8500 graphics card in 2001. Nvidia makes a modest improvement by adding a few optimizations to its N20 (GeForce 4). Despite this, the company manages to maintain its dominance due to ATi's issues with the graphic drivers and a much stronger reputation at the time.
Nvidia sold a total of 100 million graphics processors in February 2002. Additionally, she directly sells graphics cards with its processors on them.
The end of 2002 and 2003 will be a challenging time for the builder. His NV30 (GeForce FX (en)) doesn't come out until after ATI enters the market with its Radeon 9500 and 9700 graphics cards. To try to make up for the delay, Nvidia releases previously announced changes like the NV28 and NV18 CPUs for "Ti" and "Mx," respectively, These changes merely result in an AGP 8 port. Le NV30, which debuts in early 2003 with significant delay, fails miserably to meet consumer expectations.
Nvidia attempts to correct the error by quickly forgetting about the GeForce FX 5800 in favor of focusing on the NV35, an evolution that is more in line with the prevailing trends at the time. It will provide the GeForce FX 5900 and 5700. It's safe to say that the Cameleon company's generation NV3x was a technical and, to a lesser extent, a marketing failure.
In the years that followed, the company expanded its offering by also supplying chipsets for desktop PC cards based on AMD processors.
The Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is introduced in 2004. It entails working on two graphic cards simultaneously to double the amount of affixing.
In contrast to its competitor ATi, the company generates $2,079 billion in revenue in 2005 and ranks among the top five producers of "fabless" poker chips. During the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in May 2005, Nvidia announced that it would equip Sony's PlayStation 3 with graphics processors. Nominated as RSX (Reality Synthetizer) and said to be as fast as two GeForce 6800 in SLI, which roughly corresponds to the GeForce 7800 GTX.
The technical specifications and performance levels of the PS3's graphics processing unit (GPU) are astonishingly close to what was previously announced, which strongly suggests that everything about this new generation of gaming console's GPU was ready (in contrast to other components like the Cell, the processor jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba). To strengthen its chipset branch, Nvidia announced in December 2005 that it will buy and merge ULi Electronics for about 52 million dollars.
The company introduced the CUDA development environment in 2007.
Nvidia acquired AGEIA in February 2008; AGEIA is known for developing the card and software PhysX. On November 7, 2008, she experiences an almost 20% decline in revenue following the release of the anticipated financial results for the third quarter of the fiscal year 2009. The company has an annual revenue of $3,4 billion US and is one of the top five fabless producers of poker chips.
At the same year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, she debuts a multi-media processor for mobile terminals. Named APX 2500, this processor, clocked at 750 MHz, and manufactured in 65 nm is made up of an ARM11 (en) heart with 256 KB of second-level cache and a GeForce 6 generation graphics chip. She can create HD (720p) video streams that can be output to a television via an HDMI connector, but she can also process 12-megapixel photos.
In June 2011, Nvidia paid 367 million US dollars to acquire Icera, a pioneer in wireless modem and RF technology.
With the GTX 660ti, 670, 680 (mono-GPU) and GTX 690 (bi-GPU) graphics cards, she will begin selling her new Kepler architecture in March 2012. This design's goal is to divide consumption in half while maintaining performance parity with Fermi architecture.
Project Shield, a portable gaming console with a Tegra 4 processor and an HDMI output, was unveiled by the company on January 6, 2013, in conjunction with the annual Consumer Electronics Show ,Nearly a month after Nvidia released the GeForce GTX Titan, the Titan (en) series. She is based on Kepler's architectural style.
The company released the Maxwell architecture in 2014, which was used in the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti graphics cards. In 2015, Nvidia launched the GTX 900 series. The GeForce GTX Titan Black and Titan Z both launch in the same year. Based on the same architecture as the previous one, the only significant difference is the marginally higher frequency.
She releases the GeForce GTX Titan X, which is based on the Maxwell 2.0 architecture, on March 17. In 2015, the company had 82% of the market share for business computer graphics cards, pushing AMD below the 20% threshold for the first time.
She launches her new Pascal architecture in 2016, which is first displayed at Computex 2016 and then sold in the GTX 1080. She is also available in other variations, including the GTX 1060 and 1070 and, a few months later, the 1050 and 1050TI (TI denoting a more powerful graphics card than the original model). The same year, Nvidia decides to remove the mention of GTX from these Titan cards because they don't seem to be intended for video games , Therefore, a GeForce Titan X will be released, based on the same Pascal architecture as the GTX models that were released the same year.
She sells TI versions of the GTX 1080, 1070, and a Titan XP in 2017. The GeForce Titan V is scheduled to debut on the market in December of the same year ,This is the first graphic card released with the new Volta architecture intended for artificial intelligence.
The same year, the GeForce GT 1030 is released. This graphic design is primarily intended for low-cost PC setups. Nvidia and equipment manufacturer Bosch enter into a partnership in 2017 to collaborate on deep learning and autonomous vehicles.
In 2018, the company releases a new generation of graphics processors called Turing, which adds ray tracing as a new component to graphic maps. She subsequently sells a new line of graphics cards called RTX. The RTX 2080, 2080 Ti, 2070, and 2060 are available. She also created a Titan RTX , the company reported quarterly results in January 2019 that fell far short of the predetermined goals, which were based on a revenue of $2,7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018 , In March 2019, she replaces an offer from Intel by announcing the purchase of the Israeli company Mellanox for $6.7 billion. The GTX 1650, 1660, and 1660 Ti launch in the first quarter of 2019 Later, the RTX 2080 Super, 2070 Super, and 2060 Super improved cards were released .
In September 2020, Nvidia announced plans to pay the Japanese SoftBank group $40 billion to purchase the British ARM, the market leader in processors for smartphones; the deal is expected to close by March 2022, subject to regulatory approval. With this acquisition, the American company strengthens its position in artificial intelligence, connected objects, and 5G, which are some of the strongest areas of the ARM company's smartphone processors , In December 2021, American competition authorities will reject this acquisition.
Technology relating to "Nvidia" :
Scalable Link Interface (SLI) :
The Scalable Link Interface is a technology that combines up to four GeForce cards via a bridge that connects them to improve graphic performance ,Announced at the end of 2004, it was marketed as a low-cost way to boost a machine's performance, however in most cases, even when two GeForces are used, the increase in power is rarely proportional, and it gets smaller when more GeForces are added.
Nvidia announced a new SLI bridge in 2016 to coincide with the unveiling of the new GTX 1080 graphics card, the SLI HB Bridge ,Theoretically intended to double the available band width, it can only be used with two cards as opposed to the four that were previously supported ,This technology is comparable to AMD's CrossFire, despite the fact that AMD discontinued the use of the bridge starting in 2013 with its R9 290X series.
NVLink :
The NVLink is an improved version of SLI that combines the power of many cards while allowing for larger transfers to and from debits than traditional SLI .
Optimus :
Process that involves turning off the graphics card to save energy when the 3D function is not needed; the IGP then controls the display. This technology is frequently used in GeForces mobile devices, although Linux has not yet made it a standard ,Similar solutions are offered by AMD for their cards.
3D Vision :
technology, now in version 2, that enables 3D stereographic viewing on PC, the idea is to employ specialized screens that alternately display images for the left and right eyes To recreate the illusion of 3D, special eyewear divides the images between the two eyes. This technology is in opposition to AMD's HD3D. The professional version, 3D Vision Pro, uses radio transmission rather than infrared transmission.
GPU Boost :
System that increases the processor's speed while maintaining specified limits for its frequency, temperature, and consumption ,Three versions of the system used in the Kepler architecture have been produced, With the GeForce GTX 680, version 1.0 was released in 2012. Version 2.0 debuted with the GeForce Titan in 2013, however it didn't include any significant new features. With the GPU Boost 3.0, which was unveiled alongside the GTX 1080 and the Pascal architecture, the frequency increase is no longer linear like in the two previous iterations but is instead determined automatically based on the amount of tension.
PhysX :
Physical game controller that enables the creation of real-time renderings of collisions and complicated physical processes, such as the production of particles after impact.
Battery Boost :
Battery Boost is a technology that allows you to extend the battery life of a portable gaming PC by adjusting the processor, GPU, and memory clock speeds.
GeForce Experience :
auxiliary software that is typically installed concurrently with graphics card drivers and that enables users to configure ShadowPlay, broadcast to their PC from an NVIDIA Shield or Shield Android TV, and optimize games according to a measurable performance/quality ratio.
ShadowPlay :
Function that allows you to record gaming sequences, the microphone's internal sound, or even the minutes before the software activates (with adjustable quality and duration) ,NVIDIA Share has taken the place of ShadowPlay since the GeForce Experience 3.0 software update in September 2016.
Ray Tracing :
Technology used in the Turing architecture aims to more accurately recreate how light travels in video games by calculating the direction of the light beams to determine how they bounce off the various components ,Announced during the unveiling of the first graphics cards to incorporate this technology, the RTX line.
DLSS (Deep learning super sampling) :
This technology enables you to enhance gameplay while maintaining quality ,the tensor cores of RTX graphics cards' artificial intelligence is what makes the DLSS work ,the idea is to render the game at a lower resolution than the screen's, then bring it up to that resolution by filling in the image's missing pixels using deep learning artificial intelligence in an NVIDIA supercomputer, this technology is only available for graphics cards in the RTX range.