Nvidia in the context of CUDA

Northern California (commonly shortened to NorCal) is a geocultural region that comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California, spanning the northernmost 48 of the state's 58 counties. Northern California in its largest definition is determined by dividing the state into two regions, the other being Southern California. The main northern population centers include the San Francisco Bay Area (anchored by the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland), the Greater Sacramento area (anchored by the state capital Sacramento), the Redding, California, area south of the Cascade Range, and the Metropolitan Fresno area (anchored by the city of Fresno). Northern California is coterminous with the natural range of the coast redwood and the giant sequoia, with many well-known old-growth forests and smaller groves. It contains most of the Sierra Nevada, including Yosemite Valley and part of Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta (the second-highest peak in the Cascade Range after Mount Rainier in Washington), and most of the Central Valley, one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. Northern California is also home to Silicon Valley, the global headquarters for several of the largest most powerful companies in the world, including Alphabet Inc. (Google), Apple, Meta, and Nvidia.

The Northern California Megaregion, one of the 11 megaregions of the United States is centered in Northern California, and extends from Metropolitan Fresno north to Greater Sacramento, and from the Bay Area east across the Nevada state line to encompass the entire Lake Tahoe–Reno area.

S&P 500 (Standard and Poor's 500) is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 leading companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices and includes approximately 80% of the total market capitalization of U.S. public companies, with an aggregate market cap of more than $57.401 trillion as of August 29, 2025.

The S&P 500 index is a public float weighted/capitalization-weighted index. The ten largest companies on the list of S&P 500 companies account for approximately 38% of the market capitalization of the index and the 50 largest components account for 60% of the index. As of September 2025, the 10 largest components are, in order of highest to lowest weighting: Nvidia (7.2%), Microsoft (6.3%), Apple (5.9%), Alphabet (5.0%, including both class A & C shares), Amazon (4.1%), Meta Platforms (3.2%), Broadcom (2.8%), Tesla (2.3%), Berkshire Hathaway (1.8%), and JPMorgan Chase (1.4%). The components that have increased their dividends in 25 consecutive years are known as the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats. Companies in the S&P 500 derive a collective 72% of revenues from the United States and 28% from other countries.

The economy of the State of California is the largest in the United States, with a $4.048 trillion gross state product (GSP) as of 2024. It is the largest sub-national economy in the world. If California were an independent nation, it would rank as the fourth largest economy in the world in nominal terms, behind Germany and ahead of Japan.

California's Silicon Valley is home to some of the world's most valuable technology companies, including Apple, Alphabet, and Nvidia. As of June 2025, 58 of the Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in California.

Santa Clara (/ˌsæntə ˈklærə/ SAN-tə KLAR-ə; Spanish for "Saint Clare") is a city in Santa Clara County, California. The city's population was 127,647 at the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in the Bay Area. Located in the southern Bay Area, the city was founded by the Spanish in 1777 with the establishment of Mission Santa Clara de Asís under the leadership of Junípero Serra.

Santa Clara is located in the center of Silicon Valley and is home to the headquarters of companies such as Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Nvidia. It is also home to Santa Clara University, the oldest private university in California, and Levi's Stadium, the home of the National Football League's San Francisco 49ers, and California's Great America Park. Santa Clara is bordered by San Jose on almost every side, except for Sunnyvale and Cupertino to the west.

Big Tech, also referred to as the tech giants or tech titans, is a collective term for the largest and most influential technology companies in the world. It commonly denotes the five dominant firms in the U.S. technology industry—Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Meta (Facebook)—which are also the largest companies in the world by market capitalization. Other companies sometimes included in the grouping include Nvidia, Tesla, Oracle, and Netflix.

The label draws a parallel to similar classifications in other industries, such as Big Oil, Big Soda, or Big Tobacco. The concept of Big Tech can also extend to the major Chinese technology firms—Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi—collectively referred to as BATX.

Employer student loan contributions are a type of employee benefit in the United States. With this benefit, employers pay back student loans on behalf of employees, at certain amount per month as decided by the employer. Companies are using this benefit as a way to attract and retain employees, especially millennial workers. This benefit has grown as education debt has increased. According to the Washington Post, student debt has nearly tripled since the early 1990s and averaged $35,000 in 2015.

Only about 3% of companies currently offer employer student loan contributions, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resources Management from June 2015. Prominent companies that have announced this benefit include Fidelity Investments, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Natixis Global Asset Management, Kronos, NVIDIA and law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe.

The computer graphics pipeline, also known as the rendering pipeline, or graphics pipeline, is a framework within computer graphics that outlines the necessary procedures for transforming a three-dimensional (3D) scene into a two-dimensional (2D) representation on a screen. Once a 3D model is generated, the graphics pipeline converts the model into a visually perceivable format on the computer display. Due to the dependence on specific software, hardware configurations, and desired display attributes, a universally applicable graphics pipeline does not exist. Nevertheless, graphics application programming interfaces (APIs), such as Direct3D, OpenGL and Vulkan were developed to standardize common procedures and oversee the graphics pipeline of a given hardware accelerator. These APIs provide an abstraction layer over the underlying hardware, relieving programmers from the need to write code explicitly targeting various graphics hardware accelerators like AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and others.

The model of the graphics pipeline is usually used in real-time rendering. Often, most of the pipeline steps are implemented in hardware, which allows for special optimizations. The term "pipeline" is used in a similar sense for the pipeline in processors: the individual steps of the pipeline run in parallel as long as any given step has what it needs.

The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) was a consortium led by Google that develops the Android mobile operating system. Its member firms included HTC, Sony, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics (formerly), T-Mobile, Nvidia, and Wind River Systems.

The OHA was established on November 5, 2007, with 34 members, including mobile handset makers, application developers, some mobile network operators and chip makers. As part of its efforts to promote a unified Android platform, OHA members are contractually forbidden from producing devices that are based on competing forks of Android. While not officially stated, the alliance has remained dormant, with many OHA partners having moved out of the smartphone market.

In computing, the Brook programming language and its implementation BrookGPU were early and influential attempts to enable general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU). Brook, developed at Stanford University graphics group, was a compiler and runtime system for a stream programming language designed to leverage the parallelism of GPUs such as those from ATI or Nvidia.

BrookGPU compiled programs written using the Brook stream programming language, which is a variant of ANSI C. It could target OpenGL v1.3+, DirectX v9+ or AMD's Close to Metal for the computational backend and ran on both Microsoft Windows and Linux. For debugging, BrookGPU could also simulate a virtual graphics card on the CPU.

The M4 corridor is an area in the United Kingdom adjacent to the M4 motorway, which runs from London to South Wales. It is a major hi-tech hub. Important cities and towns linked by the M4 include (from east to west) London, Slough, Bracknell, Maidenhead, Reading, Newbury, Swindon, Bath, Bristol, Newport, Cardiff, Port Talbot and Swansea. The area is also served by the Great Western Main Line, the South Wales Main Line, and London Heathrow Airport. Technology companies with major operations in the area include Adobe, Amazon, Citrix Systems, Dell, Huawei, Lexmark, LG, Microsoft, Novell, Nvidia, O2, Oracle, Panasonic, SAP, and Symantec.

The Xbox is a home video game console manufactured by Microsoft. It is the first installment in the Xbox series of video game consoles. It was released on November 15, 2001, in North America, followed by Australia, Europe and Japan in 2002. As a sixth-generation console, it competed with Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast and Nintendo's GameCube. It was also the first major console produced by an American company since the release of the Atari Jaguar in 1993.

The console was announced in March 2000. With the release of the PlayStation 2, which featured the ability to playback CD-ROMs and DVDs in addition to playing games, Microsoft became concerned that game consoles would threaten the personal computer as an entertainment device for living rooms. Whereas most previous games consoles used specially designed hardware, the Xbox was built around standard PC components. It uses variations of Microsoft Windows and DirectX as its operating system to support games and media playback, and is powered by a Intel Pentium III CPU and an Nvidia GeForce 3-based GPU. The Xbox was the first console to feature a built-in hard disk. The console was designed to support broadband connectivity to the Internet via an integrated Ethernet port and Xbox Live, a fee-based online gaming service that launched in 2002. The popularity of the system's blockbuster titles such as Bungie's Halo 2 (2004) contributed to the popularity of first-person shooters and online console gaming.

Intel Arc is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) developed by Intel, representing the company's line of discrete GPUs for gaming, content creation, and professional applications. Arc GPUs are designed by Intel and manufactured under contract by TSMC. The brand also includes supporting graphics software and driver technologies, and is sold alongside Intel Graphics Technology, the company's line of integrated graphics processors, found in most of its processors.

Intel Arc competes with Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon products. The first generation, the Arc A-series, launched in 2022 with laptop GPUs debuting in March and desktop models such as the A750 and A770 following later that year.

The Radeon RX 6000 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by AMD, based on their RDNA 2 architecture. It was announced on October 28, 2020 and is the successor to the Radeon RX 5000 series. It consists of the entry-level RX 6400, mid-range RX 6500 XT, high-end RX 6600, RX 6600 XT, RX 6650 XT, RX 6700, RX 6700 XT, upper high-end RX 6750 XT, RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and enthusiast RX 6900 XT and RX 6950 XT for desktop computers; and the RX 6600M, RX 6700M, and RX 6800M for laptops. A sub-series for mobile, Radeon RX 6000S (consisting of RX 6600S, RX 6700S, and RX 6800S), was announced in CES 2022, targeting thin and light laptop designs.

The series is designed to compete with Nvidia's GeForce 30 series and Intel's Arc Alchemist series of cards. It is also the first generation of AMD GPUs that supports hardware accelerated real-time ray tracing, variable-rate shading and mesh shaders.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors or hardware accelerators. OpenCL specifies a programming language (based on C99) for programming these devices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to control the platform and execute programs on the compute devices. OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based parallelism.

OpenCL is an open standard maintained by the Khronos Group, a non-profit, open standards organisation. Conformant implementations (passed the Conformance Test Suite) are available from a range of companies including AMD, Arm, Cadence, Google, Imagination, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, SPI and Verisilicon.

Molecular modeling on GPU is the technique of using a graphics processing unit (GPU) for molecular simulations.

In 2007, Nvidia introduced video cards that could be used not only to show graphics but also for scientific calculations. These cards include many arithmetic units (as of 2022, up to 18,176 in the RTX 6000 Ada) working in parallel. Long before this event, the computational power of video cards was purely used to accelerate graphics calculations. The new features of these cards made it possible to develop parallel programs in a high-level application programming interface (API) named CUDA. This technology substantially simplified programming by enabling programs to be written in C/C++. More recently, OpenCL allows cross-platform GPU acceleration.