Timeline of key events in Nvidia's history from "The Nvidia Way" book by Tae Kim detailing Nvidia's history, culture, and the management style of Jensen Huang.
- 1993: Nvidia is founded by Jensen Huang, Curtis Priem, and Chris Malachowsky at a Denny's restaurant.
Early Years (1990s):
Nvidia released its first graphics chip, the NV1, which failed due to poor VGA compatibility and performance issues with games like "DOOM". The NV1 only partially supported VGA graphics and relied on a software emulator to supplement its VGA capabilities which resulted in slow performance.
Nvidia's second product, the NV2, is abandoned by Sega after a promising start.
Nvidia faces severe financial difficulties after the failures of NV1 and NV2.
Nvidia develops a novel and expensive software emulation machine to test chip designs. This emulator helped them to get their chip working and to the market in record time.
Nvidia released the RIVA 128, which is successful, partly due to innovative software emulation and a hardware-software integrated approach. The company made the chip as large and powerful as possible and took risks with its schedule, making it in record time and without the safety net of multiple quality-assurance runs.
Curtis Priem develops the idea of the ‘resource manager’, a miniature operating system that allows for more flexible design and faster innovation cycles. This allowed Nvidia's engineers to emulate certain hardware features that normally needed to be physically printed onto chip circuits.
Early 2000s:
- Nvidia's approach of combining hardware and software design gives it a competitive advantage.
- Nvidia’s competitor 3dfx makes a series of mistakes.
2002: Nvidia acquires the assets and patents of bankrupt graphics company 3dfx and hires some of its employees.
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2000s-2020s:
- Nvidia establishes itself as a leader in the graphics card market by employing risk-taking, relentless execution, and a focus on combined hardware/software solutions.
- Nvidia invests heavily in massively parallel computing capabilities for the next two decades.
- Nvidia develops its CUDA ecosystem.
Recent Years (Late 2010s - 2024):
- Nvidia’s stock experiences explosive growth. In 2019, their stock was trading below $4, and by the end of 2024, it was trading above $130.
- Nvidia’s market capitalization soars to over three trillion dollars.
- Nvidia becomes a major player in the AI field, leveraging its GPUs and parallel processing capabilities.
- Nvidia experiences significant growth due to the ‘AI boom’ launched by ChatGPT and other LLMs.
- An attempted acquisition of Arm is thwarted.
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