NVIDIA Celebrates GeForce 256 Anniversary, Teases AI Plans

Nvidia has honored the twenty fifth anniversary of the GeForce 256 with a long write-up reflecting at the graphics card’s transformative position within the corporate’s historical past, in addition to a large number of industries. The transfer additionally noticed Nvidia tease a few of its long run AI plans, all of which will also be traced again to the seminal GPU.

The GeForce 256 used to be first printed on August 31, 1999, sooner than hitting the marketplace on October 11. It used to be touted as “the arena’s first GPU,” promising to provide sped up graphics-based processing that may resolve all kinds of computational issues. Nvidia noticed video video games because the killer app for advertising and marketing its new product circle of relatives on the time, no longer least as a result of gaming used to be each computationally difficult and appeared find it irresistible used to be growing right into a humongous trade.

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Nvidia GeForce 256 Turns 25

1 / 4 of a century later, Nvidia has change into the arena’s second-most precious corporate, boasting a marketplace cap of $3.3 trillion as of October 2024, which places it above generation giants akin to Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. Its meteoric upward push can in large part be traced again to the GeForce 256, which marked the primary visual results of the corporate’s long-term guess on devoted graphics processing gadgets. Nvidia Director of Advertising and marketing John Fenno said as a lot in a up to date weblog put up celebrating the twenty fifth anniversary of the GeForce 256, noting how Nvidia GPUs had been sooner or later discovered to be capable to dealing with the “immense processing wishes” of deep studying computing that in the past required supercomputers, which came about circa 2011.

This discovery, mixed with the mass-market nature of the corporate’s {hardware}, ushered in an technology of fast AI developments. The rising want for Nvidia GPUs amongst knowledge scientists and AI researchers knowledgeable the corporate’s engineering priorities, as underlined via the truth that its trendy graphics playing cards are particularly designed to maintain all kinds of deep studying duties. This shift began in 2018, when Nvidia introduced the GeForce RTX 20 Sequence, its first lineup of GPUs with devoted Tensor and RT Cores aimed at dealing with AI and real-time ray tracing workloads, respectively.

Nvidia’s synthetic intelligence foray continues, with Fenno noting that the corporate’s present-day “GPUs don’t seem to be simply bettering gaming however are designing the way forward for AI itself.” The tech large therefore intends to proceed supporting all kinds of industries which can be these days within the technique of integrating AI into the very center in their companies.

As for what is subsequent for the Santa Clara-based GPU maker, the corporate is quickly anticipated to unveil the GeForce RTX 50 Sequence of graphics playing cards. In step with fresh experiences, its fourth era of GPUs with RT and Tensor Cores might be formally unveiled in January 2025, all through the following version of the Client Electronics Display (CES) in Las Vegas.

Nvidia

Date Based

April 1, 1993

Headquarters

Santa Clara, California, United States

CEO

Jensen Huang

Subsidiaries

Mellanox Applied sciences , Cumulus Networks , NVIDIA Complicated Rendering Middle