Nvidia Corporation 2010
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NVIDIA CORPORATION 2010 2010 NVIDIA CORPORATION LETTER TO STOCKHOLDERS Notice of 2010 Annual Meeting Proxy Statement and Annual Report on Form 10-K It would be an understatement to By mid-year, we were back on track. characterize fiscal 2010 as challenging. And by the fourth quarter, revenue The global recession dramatically recovered to $983 million, more than impacted sales and pushed us into the double that of a year earlier, with a red for the year’s first two quarters. profit of $131 million. For the full year, revenue declined 3 percent to $3.33 We responded quickly. We cut spending, billion, with a loss of $68 million. postponed lower-priority investments and resized for a prolonged downturn. Despite the year’s difficulties, we did GPU REVOLUTION SHIFTS INTO HIGH GEAR Our employees supported pay cuts, some of our best work ever, extending A LETTER TO OUR STOCKHOLDERS enabling us to avoid further layoffs. And our role as the world leader in visual- Jen-Hsun Huang – President, CEO and Co-Founder senior leaders cut their cash pay nearly computing technologies. We expect by half. Such sacrifices enabled us to strong, profitable growth as we look sustain investments in the projects we ahead to fiscal 2011. believe in. LETTER TO OUR STOCKHOLDERS 01 Not long ago, our efforts to create GEFORCE accelerates a consumer PC – Generating photorealistic worlds in real- technologies that transform a basic PC delivering snappy performance for those time has been one of our ongoing pursuits. into a great computer with beautiful who play games, create photo albums or For certain applications – such as custom- graphics were largely of interest to enjoy movies on the Web. configuring cars and home furnishings – coming when consumers will be able to designers and gamers. Today, they’re anything short of photorealistic choose every detail of their car, from paint relevant for nearly everyone. NVIDIA ION supercharges a netbook – representation is inadequate. That goal down to leather stitching, and inspect a allowing it to play great multimedia. has eluded us, until now. photorealistic image of the final product, The visual experience is increasingly from any angle and varying lighting QUADRO transforms a PC into a powerful central to how we use our computer – This year, we introduced the world’s first conditions. whether streaming high definition video workstation – making it capable of real-time ray tracing solution on our from YouTube, making a family vacation visualizing the largest, most complex GPUs, which does in seconds what Imagine a computer-generated image movie, playing Farmville on Facebook, or designs. previously took hours for PC servers to so real you want to reach out and touch operating a computer with a touch-based accomplish. it. Or a world so immersive you feel it all TESLA turns a basic PC server into an user interface. around you. Just as millions of movie- affordable supercomputer – opening the Ray tracing generates computer images goers have enjoyed the groundbreaking multi-million unit server market to our Demand for graphics processing units based on simulating the actual physical 3D experience of Avatar, we imagined how GPUs for the first time. (GPUs) is growing strongly. And we have properties of light. By replicating amazing it would be for gamers, designers developed brands to meet the needs of how light reflects, refracts or becomes TEGRA revolutionizes mobile computing – and scientists if we made 3D possible on specific market segments: absorbed, we are able to generate fueling handheld devices and embedded their computer. amazingly realistic images. The day is systems in cars, digital signage, and just To deliver this, we created NVIDIA 3D about anything else with a display. NVIDIA Fermi is the first GPU designed Vision, a package that incorporates new from the ground up for parallel computing. technologies for digital LCD panels, software and specialized shutter glasses. Its adoption has been fantastic. By year end, I expect most major OEMs to offer PCs, notebooks and workstations with this technology. 3D: THE NEXT DIMENSION VISUAL EXPERIENCE NOW CENTRAL If the CPU is the brain of the computer, Our work with GPUs brings to life fantastic the GPU is its soul. game worlds. It enables artists to realize their imaginations; designers to create new The CPU executes computer programs products; and scientists to simulate the real serially. The GPU performs trillions of world, from subatomic particles to stars at calculations in parallel to create beautiful We introduced a ray tracing solution the edge of the universe. that renders photorealistic images imagery. A computer with both can utilize virtually in real time. the best for each task. We recently took a significant step toward realizing the GPU’s full potential by NVIDIA 3D Vision incorporates shutter A state-of-the-art GPU is massively announcing a new chip architecture called glasses and software to produce 3D complex, requiring hundreds of engineers images that jump off the screen with Fermi, the result of more than a million startling realism. and hundreds of millions of dollars to man-hours of development. develop. It’s one of the computer industry’s greatest challenges, demanding excellence The first NVIDIA Fermi-based GPU has in science and technology, along with an three billion transistors forming 512 parallel artistic sensibility. cores – offering eight times the floating- point performance of the previous generation. LETTER TO OUR STOCKHOLDERS 03 TEGRA: OUR MOST PERSONAL COMPUTER Over the past decade, we have come to take the benefits of the Web for granted. Now that it’s integral to our lives, we want it with us all the time, which is possible THE WORLD IS We believe that tablets will become with Wi-Fi and 3G networks. All that’s our most personal computer, needed is a mobile processor providing the PARALLEL delivering rich Web experiences anywhere, anytime. performance of a PC and the battery life of a mobile phone. This is why we created Tegra, a complex The decades-old computing approach We call this parallel computing CUDA received a powerful endorsement system-on-a-chip with eight independent has been to make serial CPU cores ever architecture CUDA. It is one of the most this year when Oak Ridge National and specialized processors. Designed faster. That will always be adequate for important things we’ve ever created. Laboratory, the largest open research from the ground up to sip tiny amounts information-oriented computing tasks, supercomputing center in the United of energy, Tegra consumes 50 times less Rapid adoption of our CUDA architecture like office automation. But it can’t address States, announced that it intends to build power than the average PC notebook chip, reflects the pent-up demand for parallel a new class of emerging applications – the world’s fastest supercomputer using leading to days of battery life. computing. There are now 60,000 active Scientists at Massachusetts Institute where data doesn’t describe the contents our GPUs. They expect it to be 10-times of Technology use CUDA for their work of a spreadsheet but a slice of our world. developers around the world. More than more powerful than today’s fastest Among the most exciting developments in rapid detection of individuals in 300 universities in 39 countries teach it, in computing is the tablet. Tablets crowded places, such as airports. supercomputer. Scientists fighting cancer want to with another added every other day. incorporating Tegra processors will enable harness computers to simulate how Using CUDA GPUs to do parallel individuals to enjoy HD movies, play It’s thrilling for me to see researchers use cells mutate. Law-enforcement officials processing is not only more powerful. games, and make video phone calls. They CUDA to further their work in a wide range want surveillance systems that can It’s also much more cost effective and will facilitate the rise of modern of fields, from life sciences and computer identify a person in a teeming airport. power efficient than traditional CPU publications with embedded video and vision to energy discovery and quantum Physicians want finely detailed images clusters. Nearly every computer company reinvent how we enjoy books, magazines, chemistry. to help detect disease. Each demands a is working with us to offer CUDA GPUs in and newspapers. And because Tegra runs University of Virginia researchers powerful computing approach, capable servers and workstations. use CUDA to greatly accelerate the A scientist in Japan studying tsunamis told Flash, they will transport users to any of of processing massive amounts of detection and tracking of white blood me that CUDA is the second great surprise the 100 million websites around the world, cells in video microscopy. information. of his career; the first was when he first from anywhere. programmed a Cray-1 supercomputer. A To meet the challenge, we created a new breed of parallel-processing GPUs. They quantum physicist in Taiwan shared that work not just with the geometry and CUDA will enable him to see his life’s work pixels of an image but with numerical achieved within his own lifetime; he data of any kind. believes that we have effectively invented a modern electron microscope that lets him At Italy’s Universita di Salerno, work see, through mathematical simulations, is being done to model the behavior of millions of individual fish in studies the behavior of subatomic particles with into schooling behavior. his computer. Our Tegra processor is about the size of a stick of chewing gum. LETTER TO OUR STOCKHOLDERS 05 THE LARGER COMMUNITY PCs SMARTPHONES I believe we are better poised for growth than 500 500 Some companies cut back community and In China and Taiwan, our employees ever.