Key foods
- October 11th was the 25th anniversary of the Nvidia GeForce 256.
- Since then, Nvidia has become the second most valuable company on the planet, with a meteoric rise that can be traced back to the GeForce 256.
- Commemorating the anniversary of the “world's first GPU,” Nvidia said it plans to continue supporting the integration of artificial intelligence across a wide range of industries.
Nvidia Commemorates the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 256 with a lengthy note on the graphics card's game-changing role in the history of the company as well as multiple industries. The move also led to Nvidia announcing some of its upcoming AI plans, all of which can be traced back to the mainstream GPU.
The GeForce 256 was first announced on August 31, 1999, before being released on October 11. It was billed as “the world's first GPU” and promised to deliver accelerated graphics-based processing that would solve a wide range of computing problems. At the time, Nvidia saw video games as a killer program for marketing its new product family, especially because gaming was both computationally challenging and seemed to be developing into a massive industry.
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Nvidia GeForce 256 turned 25 years old
A quarter of a century later, Nvidia has become the world's second most valuable company, valued at $3.3 trillion as of October 2024, placing it ahead of tech giants such as Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. Its meteoric rise can be largely traced to the GeForce 256, which was the first visible result of the company's long-term bet on dedicated graphics processing units. In a recent blog post celebrating the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 256, Nvidia's chief marketing officer John Fenno mentioned how Nvidia's GPUs are finally able to handle the “huge processing demands” of deep learning computing that previously required supercomputers. . That happened around 2011.
This discovery, along with the mass-market nature of the company's hardware, ushered in an era of rapid AI development. The growing demand for Nvidia GPUs among data scientists and AI researchers reflects the company's engineering priorities, as underscored by the fact that its modern graphics cards are specifically designed to handle a wide variety of deep learning tasks. That change began in 2018, when Nvidia launched the GeForce RTX 20 series, its first line of GPUs with dedicated Tensor and RT cores designed to handle AI workloads and real-time ray tracing, respectively.
GPUs not only improve gaming, but also shape the future of artificial intelligence.
Nvidia's AI efforts continue, and Fenno noted that the company's GPUs today not only improve gaming, but also shape the future of AI. Hence, the tech giant plans to continue supporting a wide range of industries that are already integrating artificial intelligence into the heart of their business.
As for the future of the Santa Clara-based GPU maker, the company is expected to unveil the GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards soon. According to recent reports, the fourth-generation GPUs with RT and Tensor cores are likely to be officially unveiled in January 2025 during the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Nvidia
- Date of establishment
- April 1, 1993
- headquarters
- Santa Clara, California, United States
- CEO
- Jensen Huang
- Subsidiaries
- Mellanox Technologies, Cumulus Networks, NVIDIA Advanced Rendering Center