Key recommendations
- October 11th marked the 25th anniversary of the Nvidia GeForce 256.
- Since then, Nvidia has turned into the second most valuable company on the planet, 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 AI in a wide variety of industries moving forward.
Nvidia commemorated the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 256 with a lengthy article reflecting on the graphics card's transformative role in the company's history, as well as across numerous industries. The move also saw Nvidia tease some of its future AI plans, all of which can be traced back to the seminal GPU.
The GeForce 256 was first revealed on August 31, 1999, before hitting the market on October 11. It was billed as the “world's first GPU”, promising to provide accelerated graphics-based processing that would solve a wide variety of computing problems. Nvidia saw video games as the killer application for marketing its new product family at the time, not least because games were so computationally demanding that they seemed to be developing into a huge industry.
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Nvidia GeForce 256 turns 25 years old
A quarter of a century later, Nvidia has become the second most valuable company in the world, with a market capitalization of $3.3 trillion as of October 2024, placing it above tech giants such as Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta Platforms. Its meteoric rise can largely be traced to the GeForce 256, which marked the first visible result of the company's long-term bet on dedicated graphics processing units. Nvidia chief marketing officer John Fenno said this in a recent blog post celebrating the 25th anniversary of the GeForce 256, noting that Nvidia GPUs have finally proven capable of cope with the “huge processing needs” of deep learning computing that previously required supercomputers. which happened around 2011.
This breakthrough, combined with the mass-market nature of the company's hardware, ushered in an era of rapid AI advancements. The growing need for Nvidia GPUs among data scientists and AI researchers has informed the company's engineering priorities, as underscored by the fact that its modern graphics cards are specifically designed to handle a wide variety of tasks of deep learning. That shift began in 2018 when Nvidia released the GeForce RTX 20 series, its first line of GPUs with dedicated Tensor and RT cores geared toward handling AI workloads and real-time ray tracing, respectively.
GPUs don't just improve games, they design the future of AI itself.
Nvidia's AI foray continues, with Fenno noting that “the company's current GPUs aren't just improving games, they're designing the future of AI itself.” Therefore, the tech giant plans to continue to support a wide variety of industries that are currently in the process of integrating artificial intelligence into the heart of their businesses.
As for what's next for the Santa Clara-based GPU maker, the company is expected to unveil the GeForce RTX 50 series of graphics cards soon. According to recent reports, the fourth generation of GPUs with RT and Tensor Cores it is likely to be officially unveiled in January 2025 at the next edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Nvidia
- Date of establishment
- April 1, 1993
- OFFICE
- Santa Clara, California, United States of America
- CEO
- Jensen Huang
- branches
- Mellanox Technologies, Cumulus Networks, NVIDIA Advanced Rendering Center
