NVIDIA has been around as a company since 1993, a short time in computer manufacturer terms. Best known for their video cards, NVIDIA is a multi-billion dollar company today that started off as a small gleam in 3 people's eyes. Jen-Hsun Huang is the founder and CEO of NVIDIA and has taken this small company to a world-wide leader in graphics and computer technology.
2000 saw the introduction of NVIDIA into another market place along with their graphics cards, gaming consoles. The Xbox, as Microsoft came to name their console, was mostly built upon pre-existing and upcoming computer components (733 MHz P3, 8 GB HDD, NV2A (which was a Geforce 3 derivative video card), NVIDIA motherboard). NVIDIA was planning on entering the chipset business eventually, but the Xbox helped them on their way.
Late 2001 saw the introduction of NVIDIA's nForce platform. This formed the basis of many an Athlon XP system, and was the introduction of NVIDIA to other devices besides the video card. Subsequently, NVIDIA has gone into the mobile market (with Geforce-Go), handheld devices with GoForce, and the professional graphics market with Quadro.
NVIDIA didn't really become popular in the chipset business until the release of the nForce2 platform. With the release of the nForce2, NVIDIA became the number 1 chipset maker for the AMD Athlon CPU platform. Subsequent to the nforce2 NVIDIA released a 400 MHz FSB version called the nForce2 Ultra 400. This platform was the last chipset released by NVIDIA for the Athlon XP platform until now.
