Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA)  is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processing units (GPUs). Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Technologies (formerly ATI Technologies) have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles. Nvidia's best known GPU product line labeled "GeForce" is in direct competition with AMD's "Radeon" products.
 

In addition to GPU manufacturing, Nvidia provides parallel processing capabilities to researchers and scientists that allow them to efficiently run high-performance applications. They are deployed in supercomputing sites around the world.More recently, Nvidia has moved into the mobile computing market, where it produces Tegra processors powered phones and tablets, as well as auto infotainment systems.In addition to AMD, its other competitors include Intel and Qualcomm.
 

Company history

 

Founders and initial investment

Three people co-founded Nvidia in 1993:
 

▪ Jen-Hsun Huang (As of 2008 CEO), a Taiwanese-born American, previously Director of CoreWare at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

▪ Chris Malachowsky, an electrical engineer who worked at Sun Microsystems.

▪ Curtis Priem, previously a senior staff engineer and graphics chip designer at Sun Microsystems.
 

The founders gained venture capital funding from Sequoia Capital.

 

Major releases and acquisitions

The autumn of 1999 saw the release of the GeForce 256 (NV10), 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 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 drew the time of many of Nvidia's 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 2000, Nvidia acquired the intellectual assets of its one-time rival 3dfx, one of the biggest graphics companies of the mid- to late-1990s.
 

In July 2002, Nvidia acquired Exluna for an undisclosed sum. Exluna made software rendering tools and the personnel were merged into the Cg project. 
 

In August 2003, Nvidia acquired MediaQ for approximately $70million.
 

On April 22, 2004, Nvidia acquired iReady, a provider of high performance TCP/IP and iSCSI offload solutions.
 

December 2004 saw the announcement that Nvidia would assist Sony with the design of the graphics processor (RSX) in the PlayStation 3 game console. In March 2006 it emerged that Nvidia would deliver RSX to Sony as an IP core, and that Sony alone would organize the manufacture of the RSX. Under the agreement, Nvidia will provide ongoing support to port the RSX to Sony's fabs of choice (Sony and Toshiba), as well as die shrinks to 65 nm. This practice contrasts with Nvidia's business arrangement with Microsoft, in which Nvidia managed production and delivery of the Xbox GPU through Nvidia's usual third-party foundry contracts. Meanwhile, Microsoft choseto license a design by ATI and to make its own manufacturing arrangements for the Xbox 360 graphics hardware, as has Nintendo for the Wii console (which succeeds the ATI-based Nintendo GameCube).
 

On December 14, 2005, Nvidia acquired ULI Electronics, which at the time supplied third-party southbridge parts for chipsets to ATI, Nvidia's competitor.
 

In March 2006, Nvidia acquired Hybrid Graphics.
 

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.
 

Forbes magazine named Nvidia its Company of the Year for 2007, citing the accomplishments it made during the said period as well as during the previous 5 years.
 

On January 5, 2007, Nvidia announced that it had completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc.
 

In February 2008, Nvidia acquired Ageia Technologies for an undisclosed sum. "The purchase reflects both companies' shared goal of creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia. "By combining the teams that created the world's most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce-accelerated PhysX to twelve million gamers around the world."
 

In April 2009, a court consolidated multiple class action suits into one case, titled The Nvidia GPU Litigation.Nvidia agreed to replace faulty chips in or reimburse purchasers who already spent to get their laptop repaired. Nvidia also gave replacement laptops to many users in lieu of making a repair. The replacements and payments were not made until the settlement was finalized in 2011. Users were required to show proof of purchase and mail in their original faulty laptop. The chips were present in a number of Dell and HP laptops, as well as two Apple MacBook Pro models. Although the settlement cost Nvidia millions of dollars, many of the individuals were unhappy with the settlement, and multiple websites and blogs reflected this. The website entitled Fair Nvidia Settlement was one such site.
 

On January 10, 2011, Nvidia signed a six-year cross-licensing agreement with Intel which marks the end of all outstanding legal disputes between these two companies. According to the agreement Intel will pay Nvidia $1.5 billion in licensing fees payable in five annual installments.
 

On February 15, 2011, Nvidia announced and demonstrated the first quad-core processor for mobile devices at the at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This chip is expected to ship with many tablets to be released in the second half of 2011.
 

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 cash.