Coordinates: 37°22′14.62″N 121°57′49.46″W / 37.3707278°N 121.9637389°W / 37.3707278; -121.9637389

Nvidia Corporation

NVIDIA logo
Type	Public company
Traded as	NASDAQ: NVDA S&P 500 Component
Industry	Specialized semiconductors
Founded	1993
Founder(s)	Jen-Hsun Huang Chris Malachowsky Curtis Priem
Headquarters	Santa Clara, California, USA
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Jen-Hsun Huang (President, CEO)
Products	Graphics processing units Chipsets
Revenue	US$3.326 billion (2010)
Operating income	$98.945 million (2010)
Net income	$67.987 million (2010)
Total assets	$3.586 billion (2010)
Total equity	$2.665 billion (2010)
Employees	7,000 (2011)
Website	http://nvidia.com

Nvidia headquarters in Santa Clara

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA;  /ɪnˈvɪdiə/ in-VID-ee-ə)^[1] 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.^[2][3] More recently, Nvidia has moved into the mobile computing market, where its Tegra processors powered phones and tablets, as well as auto infotainment systems.^[4][5][6] In addition to AMD, its other competitors include Intel and Qualcomm.

Product families[link]

Nvidia's product portfolio includes graphics processors, wireless communications processors, PC platform (motherboard core logic) chipsets, and digital media player software. The community of computer users arguably has come to know Nvidia best for its GeForce product line, which consists of both a complete line of discrete graphics chips found in AIB (add-in board) video cards and core graphics technology used in nForce motherboards, Microsoft's original Xbox game console, and Sony's PlayStation 3 game console.

The following are the most notable product families produced by Nvidia:

• GeForce (The gaming graphics processing products for which Nvidia is best known.)
• Quadro (Computer-aided design and digital content creation workstation graphics processing products.)
• Tegra (A system on a chip series for mobile devices.)
• Tesla (Dedicated general purpose GPU for high-end image generation applications in professional and scientific fields.)
• nForce (A motherboard chipset created by nVidia for AMD Athlon and Duron microprocessors.)

Company history[link]

Founders and initial investment[link]

Three people co-founded Nvidia in 1993:^[7]

• Jen-Hsun Huang (As of 2008^[update] 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.^[8]

Major releases and acquisitions[link]

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.^[9]

In July 2002, Nvidia acquired Exluna for an undisclosed sum. Exluna made software rendering tools and the personnel were merged into the Cg project. ^[10]

In August 2003, Nvidia acquired MediaQ for approximately $70million.^[11]

On April 22, 2004, Nvidia acquired iReady, a provider of high performance TCP/IP and iSCSI offload solutions.^[12]

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 chose^[when?] to 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.^[13]

In March 2006, Nvidia acquired Hybrid Graphics.^[14]

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.^[15]

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.^[16]

On January 5, 2007, Nvidia announced that it had completed the acquisition of PortalPlayer, Inc.^[17]

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."^[18]

In April 2009, a court consolidated multiple class action suits into one case, titled The Nvidia GPU Litigation.^[19] 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 ^[20] 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.^[21]

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.^[22]

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.^[23][24]

Open source software support[link]

Nvidia does not publish the documentation for its hardware, meaning that programmers cannot write appropriate and effective open-source drivers for Nvidia's products (compare Graphics hardware and FOSS). Instead, Nvidia provides its own binary GeForce graphics drivers for X.Org and a thin open-source library that interfaces with the Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris kernels and the proprietary graphics software. Nvidia also supports an obfuscated open-source driver that only supports two-dimensional hardware acceleration and ships with the X.Org distribution. Nvidia's Linux support has promoted mutual adoption in the entertainment, scientific visualization, defense and simulation/training industries, traditionally dominated by SGI, Evans & Sutherland, and other relatively costly vendors.^{[citation needed]}

The proprietary nature of Nvidia's drivers has generated dissatisfaction within free-software communities. Some Linux and BSD users insist on using only open-source drivers, and regard Nvidia's insistence on providing nothing more than a binary-only driver as wholly inadequate, given that competing manufacturers (like Intel) offer support and documentation for open-source developers, and that others (like ATI) release partial documentation and provide some active development.^[25][26]

Because of the closed nature of the drivers, Nvidia video cards do not deliver adequate features on some platforms and architectures (However this is credited^{[by whom?]} to be due to lack of the proper kernel API needed for implementation). Support for three-dimensional graphics acceleration in Linux on the PowerPC does not exist; nor does support for Linux on the hypervisor-restricted PlayStation 3 console. While some users accept the Nvidia-supported drivers, many users of open-source software would prefer better out-of-the-box performance if given the choice.^[27]

However, the performance and functionality of the binary Nvidia video card drivers surpass those of open-source alternatives^{[citation needed]} following VESA standards.

Sales and market trends[link]

According to a survey conducted by market watch firm Jon Peddie Research,^[28] Nvidia shipped an estimated 33.00 million graphics chips in the first quarter of 2010, for a market share of 31.5%. AMD and Intel shipped an estimated 25.15 million units (24.0% market share) and an estimated 45.49 million units (43.5% market share) respectively. Nvidia's year-to-year growth was 41.9%.

In August 2011, Nvidia predicted the growth of its revenues would be 4% to 6%, instead of 4%, as analysts said.^[29]

In September 2011, Nvidia forecast strong sales for 2013 in the region of $4.75bn to $5bn, which surpasses analysts expectations of $4.45bn.^[30]

See also[link]

	San Francisco Bay Area portal
	Companies portal

• Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units
• Graphics Processing Unit
• Nvidia demos
• GeForce
• Nvidia Tegra
• Integrated graphics
• Nvidia Ion
• Nvision
• Video In Video Out (VIVO)
• Molecular modeling on GPU
• Invidia
• List of games with Nvidia 3D Vision support
• PhysX
• Nouveau
• Rambus Inc. v. Nvidia

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Nvidia

• Official website
• Nvidia.com drivers download page
• GeForce.com, official gaming community site

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Linus Torvalds
Torvalds in 2002[1]
Born	Linus Benedict Torvalds (1969-12-28) December 28, 1969 (age 42) Helsinki, Finland
Residence	Portland, Oregon, United States
Nationality	Finnish American[2]
Ethnicity	Swedish-speaking Finn[3]
Alma mater	University of Helsinki
Occupation	Software engineer
Employer	Linux Foundation
Known for	Linux kernel, Git
Spouse	Tove Torvalds née Monni
Children	3
Parents	Nils Torvalds (father) Anna Torvalds (mother)[4]
Relatives	Ole Torvalds (grandfather)
Website
torvalds-family.blogspot.com www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/torvalds/(outdated)]

Linus Benedict Torvalds (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈliːn.ɵs ˈtuːr.valds] ( listen); born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish American^[2][5] software engineer and hacker, best known for having initiated the development of the open source Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator. He also created the revision control system Git. He was honored (shared with Dr Shinya Yamanaka) with the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "in recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system for computers leading to the widely used Linux kernel".^[6]

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. He is the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds,^[7] and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5% of Finland's population). Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character".^[8]

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki between 1988 and 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science from NODES research group.^[9] His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the Finnish Army, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the mandatory military service of Finland. In the army he holds the rank of second lieutenant, with the role of a ballistic calculation officer.^[10] In 1990, he resumed his university studies, and was exposed to UNIX for the first time, in the form of a DEC MicroVAX running ULTRIX.^[11] His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.^[12]

His interest in computers began with a Commodore VIC-20.^[13] After the VIC-20 he purchased a Sinclair QL, which he modified extensively, especially its operating system. He programmed an assembly language and a text editor for the QL, as well as a few games.^[14] He is known to have written a Pac-Man clone named Cool Man. On January 5, 1991^[15] he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC^[16] before receiving his MINIX copy, which in turn enabled him to begin work on Linux.^[8][17]

Later years[link]

After a visit to Transmeta in late 1996,^[4] Torvalds accepted a position at the company in California, where he would work from February 1997 to June 2003. He then moved to the Open Source Development Labs, which has since merged with the Free Standards Group to become the Linux Foundation, under whose auspices he continues to work. In June 2004, Torvalds and his family moved to Portland, Oregon, to be closer to the OSDL's Beaverton, Oregon–based headquarters.

From 1997 to 1999, he was involved in 86open helping to choose the standard binary format for Linux and Unix. In 1999, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.^[18]

Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation.^[19] In 1999, both companies went public and Torvalds' share value temporarily shot up to roughly $20 million.^[20][21]

His personal mascot is a penguin nicknamed Tux,^[22] which has been widely adopted by the Linux community as the mascot of the Linux kernel.^[23]

Although Torvalds believes "open source is the only right way to do software", he also has said that he uses the "best tool for the job", even if that includes proprietary software.^[24] He was criticized for his use and alleged advocacy of the proprietary BitKeeper software for version control in the Linux kernel. However, Torvalds subsequently wrote a free-software replacement for BitKeeper called Git. Torvalds has commented on official GNOME developmental mailing lists that, in terms of desktop environments, he encourages users to switch to KDE.^[25][26] However, Torvalds thought KDE 4.0 was a "disaster" because of its lack of maturity, so he switched to GNOME.^[27] Dissatisfied with the loss of productivity, he switched to XFCE after the GNOME3 release, with another harsh post against GNOME.^[28]

The Linus/Linux connection[link]

Initially Torvalds wanted to call the kernel he developed Freax (a combination of "free", "freak", and the letter X to indicate that it is a Unix-like system), but his friend Ari Lemmke, who administered the FTP server where the kernel was first hosted for downloading, named Torvalds' directory linux.

Authority and trademark[link]

As of 2006, approximately two percent of the Linux kernel was written by Torvalds himself.^[21] As thousands have contributed to the Linux kernel, this percentage is one of the largest contributions to it. Though, he stated in 2012, that his own personal contribution is mostly merging code written by others, with little programming.^[29] Torvalds remains the final authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.^[30]

Torvalds owns the "Linux" trademark, and monitors^[31] use of it; chiefly through the Linux Mark Institute.

Personal life[link]

Linus in 2002

Linus Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds (née Monni)—a six-time Finnish national karate champion—whom he first met in the autumn of 1993.^[32] Torvalds was running introductory computer laboratory exercises for students and instructed the course attendants to send him an e-mail as a test, to which Tove responded with an e-mail asking for a date.^[8] Tove and Linus were later married and have three daughters, Patricia Miranda (*5.12.1996), Daniela Yolanda (*16.4.1998), and Celeste Amanda (*20.11.2000),^[33] two of whom were born in the United States.^[5] The Linux kernel's reboot system call accepts their dates of birth (written in hexadecimal) as magic values.^[34][35]

Torvalds describes himself as "completely a-religious—atheist", adding that "I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both. It gives people the excuse to say, 'Oh, nature was just created,' and so the act of creation is seen to be something miraculous. I appreciate the fact that, 'Wow, it's incredible that something like this could have happened in the first place.'" He later added that while in Europe religion is mostly a personal issue, in America it has become very politicized.^[36] When discussing the issue of church and state separation, Linus also said, "Yeah, it's kind of ironic that in many European countries, there is actually a kind of legal binding between the state and the state religion."^[37]

In 2010, Torvalds became a United States citizen and registered to vote in the United States; he is unaffiliated with any U.S. political party, saying, "I have way too much personal pride to want to be associated with any of them, quite frankly."^[5]

Recognition[link]

Internet Hall of Fame

On April 23, 2012 at Internet Society's Global INET conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Torvalds was one of the inaugural inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame, one of ten in the Innovators category and thirty-three overall inductees.^[38]

Millennium Technology Prize

In April 20, 2012, Torvalds was declared one of two winners of that year's Millennium Technology Prize,^[39] together with Shinya Yamanaka^[40] for what is widely described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the technology field.

Academics

In 1997, Torvalds received his Master degree (Laudatur Grade) from Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. Two years later he received honorary doctor status at Stockholm University, and in 2000 he received the same honor from his alma mater.^[41]

In August 2005, Torvalds received the Vollum Award from Reed College.^[42]

Industry

In 1998 Torvalds received an EFF Pioneer Award.^[43] In 2000 he was awarded the Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society.^[44] In 2001, he shared the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Well-Being with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura. In 2008, he was inducted into the Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.^[45][46] He was awarded the C&C Prize by the NEC Corporation in 2010 for "contributions to the advancement of the information technology industry, education, research, and the improvement of our lives".^[47]

Media

Time magazine has recognized Torvalds multiple times:

• In 2000, he was 17th in their Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century Poll.^[48]
• In 2004, he was named one of the most influential people in the world^[49]
• In 2006, the magazine's Europe edition named him one of the revolutionary heroes of the past 60 years.^[50]

InfoWorld presented him with the 2000 Award for Industry Achievement.^[51] In 2005 Torvalds appeared as one of "the best managers" in a survey by BusinessWeek.^[52] In 2006, Business 2.0 magazine named him one of "10 people who don't matter" because the growth of Linux has shrunk Torvalds' individual impact.^[53]

In summer 2004, viewers of YLE (the Finnish Broadcasting Company) placed Torvalds 16th in the network's 100 Greatest Finns. In 2010, as part of a series called The Britannica Guide to the World's Most Influential People, Torvalds was listed among The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time (ISBN 9781615300037).^[54]

Space

In 1996, an asteroid (9793 Torvalds) was named after him.

Patents

As of March 2011, Linus has been granted 35 patents worldwide (application and granted patents).^[55]

See also[link]

• Linus' Law
• Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Linus Torvalds

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Linus Torvalds

• Linus' blog at blogspot.com
• Linus Torvalds and His Five Entrepreneurial Lessons
• Young, Robert (March 1994). "Interview with Linus, the Author of Linux". Linux Journal (#1). http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2736. 
• Richardson, Marjorie (November 1999). "Interview: Linus Torvalds". Linux Journal (#67). http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3655. 
• Fresh Air radio interview – June 4, 2001
• Ten years of NODES
• Torvalds interview

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