NVIDIA Corporation

NVIDIA Corporation is one of the major suppliers of graphics processors (GPUs), graphics cards and media and communications devices for PCs and game consoles (XBox). The company HQ is in Santa Clara, California. Revenues for 2001 were $1.37 billion, rising from $735.3 million in 2000. Net income in 2001 was $177.1 million, up from $99.9 million.

The company was founded in January 1993 by Jen-Hsun Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem and incorporated in California in April 1993 (later re-incorporating itself in Delaware). The company was relatively low-key until the late 1997-98 when it launched its line of RIVA PC graphics processor. It went public in January 1999 on NASDAQ, in May of that year it shipped its 10 millionth graphics processor. In 2000 it showed its dominance by buying the intellectual assets of 3dfx, one of the biggest graphics companies of the early to mid 1990s. It was also chosen to supply the graphics requirements of Microsoft's Xbox. They established close ties with many OEM companies as well as organizations like SGI. By February, 2002 NVIDIA had shipped 100 million processors.

NVIDIA is currently the leader in the graphics card industry, controlling a majority of the market. This dominance was based on the GeForce line of video cards, first launched in 1999. The original GeForce had the first GPU that was called such. Currently the only major opposition to NVIDIA in the consumer market is ATI.

External links

• http://www.nvidia.com/ - Official homepage