Re: Download Nvidia For Mac
Harriet Wehrenberg
Nvidia Corporation[a][b] (/ɛnˈvɪdiə/, en-VID-ee-ə) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware.[5] It is a software and fabless company which designs and supplies graphics processing units (GPUs), application programming interfaces (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 also a dominant supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) hardware and software.[6][7][8]
Nvidia's professional line of GPUs are used for edge-to-cloud computing and in supercomputers and workstations for applications in such fields as architecture, engineering and construction, media and entertainment, automotive, scientific research, and manufacturing design.[9] Its GeForce line of GPUs are aimed at the consumer market and are used in applications such as video editing, 3D rendering and PC gaming. In the second quarter of 2023, Nvidia had a market share of 80.2% in the discrete desktop GPU market.[10] The company expanded its presence in the gaming industry with the introduction of the Shield Portable (a handheld game console), Shield Tablet (a gaming tablet) and Shield TV (a digital media player), as well as its cloud gaming service GeForce Now.[11]
In addition to GPU design and manufacturing, Nvidia provides the CUDA software platform and API that allows the creation of massively parallel programs which utilize GPUs.[12][13] They are deployed in supercomputing sites around the world.[14][15] In the late 2000s, Nvidia had moved into the mobile computing market, where it produces Tegra mobile processors for smartphones and tablets as well as vehicle navigation and entertainment systems.[16][17][18] Its competitors include AMD, Intel,[19] Qualcomm[20] and AI accelerator companies such as Cerebras and Graphcore. It also makes AI-powered software for audio and video processing, e.g. Nvidia Maxine.[21]
Nvidia's offer to acquire Arm from SoftBank in September 2020 failed to materialize following extended regulatory scrutiny, leading to the termination of the deal in February 2022 in what would have been the largest semiconductor acquisition.[22][23]
In 2023, Nvidia became the seventh public U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion,[24] and, as of March 2024, it is the world's third most-valuable publicly traded company, after Microsoft and Apple, with a market capitalization of $2.3 trillion.[25]
Nvidia was founded on April 5, 1993,[26][27][28] by Jensen Huang (CEO as of 2024[update]), 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.[29][30] The three men agreed to start the company in a meeting at a Denny's roadside diner on Berryessa Road in East San Jose.[31][32]
At the time, Malachowsky and Priem were frustrated with Sun's management and were already looking to leave, but Huang was on "firmer ground",[33] in that he was already running his own division at LSI.[32] The three co-founders discussed a vision of the future which was so compelling that Huang decided to leave LSI[33] and become the chief executive officer of their new startup.[32]
In 1993, the three co-founders envisioned that the ideal trajectory for the forthcoming wave of computing would be in the realm of accelerated computing, specifically in graphics-based processing. This path was chosen due to its unique ability to tackle challenges that eluded general-purpose computing methods.[33] They also observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume; the two conditions do not happen very often.[33] Video games became the company's flywheel to reach large markets and fund huge R&D to solve massive computational problems.[33] With $40,000 in the bank, the company was born.[33] The company subsequently received $20 million of venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital and others.[34]
Nvidia initially had no name and the co-founders named all their files NV, as in "next version".[33] The need to incorporate the company prompted the co-founders to review all words with those two letters.[33] At one point, Malachowsky and Priem wanted to call the company NVision, but that name was already taken by a manufacturer of toilet paper.[32] Huang suggested the name Nvidia,[32] from "invidia", the Latin word for "envy".[33] The company's original headquarters office was in Sunnyvale, California.[33]
Nvidia's first graphics accelerator product, the NV1, was optimized for processing quadratic primitives instead of the triangle primitives preferred by its competitors.[32] Then Microsoft introduced the DirectX platform, refused to support any other graphics software,[35] and also announced that its graphics software (Direct3D) would support only triangles.[32]
Nvidia also signed a contract with Sega to build the graphics chip for the Dreamcast video game console and worked on the project for a year.[36] Having bet on the wrong technology, Nvidia was confronted with a painful dilemma: keep working on its inferior chip for the Dreamcast even though it was already too far behind the competition, or stop working and run out of money right away.[36]
Eventually, Sega's president at the time, Shoichiro Irimajiri, came to visit Huang in person to deliver the news that Sega was going with another graphics chip vendor for the Dreamcast.[36] However, Irimajiri still believed in Huang, and "wanted to make Nvidia successful".[36] Despite Nvidia's disappointing failure to deliver on its contract, Irimajiri somehow managed to convince Sega management to invest $5 million into Nvidia.[36] Years later, Huang explained that this was all the money Nvidia had left at the time, and that Irimajiri's "understanding and generosity gave us six months to live".[36]
Nvidia sold about a million RIVA 128s in about four months[32] and used the revenue to develop its next generation of products.[35] In 1998, the release of the RIVA TNT solidified Nvidia's reputation for developing capable graphics adapters.
Nvidia went public on January 22, 1999.[37][38][39] Investing in Nvidia after it had already failed to deliver on its contract turned out to be Irimajiri's best decision as Sega's president. After Irimajiri left Sega in 2000, Sega sold its Nvidia stock for $15 million.[36]
In late 1999, Nvidia released the GeForce 256 (NV10), its first product expressly marketed as a GPU, which was most notable for introducing onboard 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 the mid-1990s until 2000.[40][41] The acquisition process was finalized in April 2002.[42]
In July 2002, Nvidia acquired Exluna for an undisclosed sum. Exluna made software-rendering tools and the personnel were merged into the Cg project.[44] In August 2003, Nvidia acquired MediaQ for approximately US$70 million.[45] On April 22, 2004, Nvidia acquired iReady, also a provider of high-performance TCP/IP and iSCSI offload solutions.[buzzword][46] 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.[47] In March 2006, Nvidia acquired Hybrid Graphics.[48] 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.[49]
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.[50] On January 5, 2007, Nvidia announced that it had completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc.[51] In February 2008, Nvidia acquired Ageia, developer of PhysX, a physics engine and physics processing unit. Nvidia announced that it planned to integrate the PhysX technology into its future GPU products.[52][53]
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.[54][55] On January 10, 2011, Nvidia signed a six-year, $1.5 billion cross-licensing agreement with Intel, ending all litigation between the two companies.[56]
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.[57][58] In May 2011, it was announced that Nvidia had agreed to acquire Icera, a baseband chip making company in the UK, for $367 million.[59] 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 a chip.[60] On July 29, 2013, Nvidia announced that they acquired PGI from STMicroelectronics.[61]
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