14 DAY TRIAL // Once in a while, a company or another will proudly announce the reaching of a milestone or the accomplishment of a certain goal, and NVIDIA and TSMC definitely did something along these lines not long ago.
This once, NVIDIA did not reveal some new product or technology, neither did it enter any sort of collaboration for the advancement of a goal.
What the company, along with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, took some time to point out how far the GeForce GPU series has come.
Simply put, NVIDIA and the foundry responsible for the manufacture of its graphics processing units shipped the one billionth GeForce processor.
This definitely is no small achievement, although, true enough, it took almost 12 years for it to come to pass.
For those that would like a reminder or update, the GeForce family was started by the NV10-powered GeForce 256 (SDR) and had support fro DirectX 7. This happened in August 1999.
"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," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer, Nvidia.
"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 centers."
"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,” said Dr. Morris Chang, TSMC Chairman and CEO.
“NVIDIA has been a model of vision and innovation, and we highly value the long-term relationship between NVIDIA and TSMC," Chang added.
One can only wonder how long it will take for the second billionth chip to be made and sent out.