NVIDIA, TSMC ship one billionth GeForce graphics chip
updated 12:00 pm EST, Thu January 13, 2011
NVIDIA, TSMC celebrate 1b GeForce chip shipments
NVIDIA and manufacturing partner TSMC on Thursday announced they've shipped the one-billionth GeForce graphics processor. The achievement shows the popularity of the line of GPUs from NVIDIA, which are offered by most PC makers in desktops and notebooks. The two took roughly 12 years to achieve the feat following the original GeForce 256 from 1999.
"With our close partnership with TSMC, the complexity of these devices has increased more than 1,000 times, enabling enormous progress in computers ranging from handhelds and PCs to workstations and data centers," NVIDIA chief Jen-Hsun Huang said.
Whether the two can keep up the pace for the next 12 years remains to be seen, as more and more chipmakers are building ever-more competent integrated GPUs on their generic processing chips. Intel's Sandy Bridge-era Core chips now have in-processor video that can compete with some dedicated chipsets, and AMD's Fusion E-series chips also provide much faster performance than integrated chips could manage in the past.
