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NVIDIA and TSMC ship billionth GeForce GPU

by Pete Mason on 14 January 2011, 11:10

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), TSMC

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NVIDIA has been pretty busy lately. Having regained GPU supremacy at the end of last year, the company knocked one out of the proverbial park at CES by announcing partnerships that will see its Tegra chips in a number of must-have devices - and cars.

Now, less than a week after the trade show closed, the company has another win to shout about. In a joint press-release with manufacturing partner TSMC, NVIDIA announced that it had shipped its billionth GeForce graphics processor.

The milestone comes after less than twelve years of working together, meaning that the two companies have pumped out - on average - more than 150 GPUs every minute of every day since the partnership began. The first GeForce GPU - and the first graphics accelerator coin the phrase GPU - was the GeForce 256, launched in mid-1999.

The NV10-powered GeForce 256 - the card that started it all

Dr Morris Chang, CEO of TSMC commented that "NVIDIA's achievement is a prime example of how close collaboration between foundry and fabless companies can benefit the consumer electronics market, the semiconductor market segment, and both companies' shareholders. NVIDIA has been a model of vision and innovation, and we highly value the long-term relationship between NVIDIA and TSMC".

NVIDIA's Jen-Hsun Huang added that "since inventing the GPU more than a decade ago, NVIDIA has driven innovation in these processors at a rate virtually unmatched in the technology industry. With our close partnership with TSMC, the complexity of these devices has increased more than 1000 times, enabling enormous progress in computers ranging from handhelds and PCs to workstations and data centres".

With the company's chips now popping up in more places than ever, we don't expect that it'll take another twelve years for the companies to build the next billion graphics processors. 



HEXUS Forums :: 9 Comments

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I hope the 1,000,000,000th customer got a good prize!
I have seen this press release on multiple sites and every time i have to wonder what is meant by this “since inventing the GPU more than a decade ago” Is it supposed to mean since inventing the GeForce GPU specifically?
The article says they coined the term GPU, so they invented the GPU.
bear jesus;2032216
… i have to wonder what is meant by this “since inventing the GPU more than a decade ago”

Wikipedia
The term was defined and popularized by Nvidia in 1999, who marketed the GeForce 256 as “the world's first ‘GPU’, or Graphics Processing Unit, a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second.”

Not that I'm claiming Wikipedia knows everything, mind you, but it seems fairly clear…
Oh so they invented the word to describe the device, makes more sense now :laugh:

I must admit i somehow scanned over the article multiple times and missed that line every time and had been taught the term for my 3dfx voodoo in the mid 90's so was very confused as to how it was meant… guess i should learn to read before i type another forum post
:stupid: :laugh: my bad.