Some questions re: Nvidia

A

Arty

KEPLER
Veteran
Doing a paper+presentation on Nvidia at school and these topics are eluding me. Any help is appreciated.

  • Total number of patents held by Nvidia
  • Nvidia aquisitions (3dfx, MediaQ, ULi, Portal Player and what else)
  • Design wins (PS3, iPod, iPhone, PSP2 :p I suppose I could use the last two with an asterisk)
  • Licensing technologies
  • Focus on internal or external innovation
  • Any market share reports over past 4-5 years
 
Stexar was not acquired; NVIDIA only got the employees. That's quite different. If you wanted to also list those, 3DLabs also comes to mind (NVIDIA got most of the employees of one of their HW design centers.) - and possibly SGI, but that's even more arguable for a number of reasons.

3DFX (and iReady, I think, but I'm not 100% sure) also isn't a/aren't true acquisition(s); NVIDIA bought the IP, not the engineers. They might have gotten most of them anyway, but they weren't truly part of the deal...
And another company you forgot about is Exluna: http://news.com.com/2100-1040-945553.html

When it comes to patents, it depends on how you want to count... Just go to the US patents website and use "assignee name: nvidia", if you don't want an overly precise figure. And for design wins, if you're including the iPhone, you might as well add the Video iPod too.


Uttar
 
Uttar said:
Stexar was not acquired; NVIDIA only got the employees. That's quite different.
Click to expand...

But Uttar, if Stexar was a very recent startup from ex-Intel guys then, in practice, it was an acquisition.
The company lived mostly because of it's staff, i doubt it had significant IP in such a small timeframe between establishment and liquidation.
 
INKster said:
But Uttar, if Stexar was a very recent startup from ex-Intel guys then, in practice, it was an acquisition.
Click to expand...
It's not technically an acquisition if no money is paid to another corporate entity, tbh.

There are plenty of startups that screw up, and even bigger companies that do. And then it's frequent if the number of core employees is relatively small that they all get a job at another specific company, basically making it look like an IP-less acquisition, considering the likely one-time sums (bonuses) involved; but it really isn't one, imo.

Another example would be S3 India becoming a discrete company (a startup, really) and then now, many of those guys are at NVIDIA Bangalore, I think. None of this makes the Stexar pseudo-acquisition less strategically interesting, although I think The Inq's understanding of that stuff is awfully wrong. It'd be naive to think NVIDIA didn't already have ex-CPU guys though; perhaps you should google "Stuart Oberman" ;)


Uttar
 
Uttar said:
It's not technically an acquisition if no money is paid to another corporate entity, tbh.

There are plenty of startups that screw up, and even bigger companies that do. And then it's frequent if the number of core employees is relatively small that they all get a job at another specific company, basically making it look like an IP-less acquisition, considering the likely one-time sums (bonuses) involved; but it really isn't one, imo.

Another example would be S3 India becoming a discrete company (a startup, really) and then now, many of those guys are at NVIDIA Bangalore, I think. None of this makes the Stexar pseudo-acquisition less strategically interesting, although I think The Inq's understanding of that stuff is awfully wrong. It'd be naive to think NVIDIA didn't already have ex-CPU guys though; perhaps you should google "Stuart Oberman" ;)


Uttar
Click to expand...

Ok, if you want to play with rethoric, it was a head-count acquisition. :LOL:
The fact it failed could have been about technical guys trying to manage a startup.
Corporate management/marketing and hardware technical capabilities don't always go well together.

And yes, i know of that ex-AMD fellow.
His G80-related patent caused quite a stir not long ago right here at B3D. ;)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
INKster said:
Ok, if you want to play with rethoric, it was a head-count acquisition. :LOL:
Click to expand...
Heh, sure :) Just like 3DFX was an IP acquisition, not an head-count one, although they did get a fair share of the engineers, but far from all of them. And probably only a minority of the workforce in other segments. My point only was that Stexar or 3DLabs don't fit in a list of acquisitons for a school presentation.

Regarding Stuart Oberman, there are other ex-AMD and ex-Intel guys at NVIDIA, but obviously less high-profile. Stuart also worked on the FPUs for G80, not only the interpolators, although he wasn't that project's lead (Lindholm was the overall lead for the shader core, AFAIK...)


Uttar
 
Somewhere around here, a few months back around the time of the announcement of the AMD/ATI merger, I posted a link to a research paper about relative IP strengths of Intel, AMD, ATI, and Nvidia. It may give you some insight on patents, if you can find it again.
 
Probably a bit too general in the areas you're looking for detailed information, but have you checked out Nvidia's recent corporate materials and financial forms (Form 10-Q, 10-K, etc)?
 
serenity, i would like to read your paper on nvidia. could you email me a copy?
geekcomputing (AT) yahoo .com

Its probably way to late now but nvidia has quadro chips in the F-22 fighter jet fyi

check out this company as they do a lot of military stuff for nvidia.
http://www.quantum3d.com/

(i did a paper on nvidia in 2004 btw)
 
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