incorporated in California in April 1993 and reincorporated in Delaware in April 1998. Our headquarter facilities are in Santa Clara, California. Our web address is www.nvidia.com. The contents of our website are not a part of this Form 10-K.



Recent Developments, Future Objectives and Challenges

 

GPU Business



        During fiscal year 2011, we took the computational capabilities of our GPUs to a new level with the launch of our Fermi architecture.  Fermi GPUs are designed to excel at tessellation, the key feature of DirectX 11, and to allow game developers to increase the level of physics realism via our PhysX API.  Our flagship product for the desktop, the GeForce GTX 480, was followed by a complete line-up of 400-series GPUs.  Later in the year, we refreshed them with our 500-series GPUs, which significantly increased the performance of the products they replaced while fitting into similar power envelopes. We also launched 400M- and 500M-series GPUs for notebooks, along with our Optimus technology, which switches invisibly between discrete GPU and integrated graphics controller depending on the user’s activities.  By doing so, NVIDIA Optimus provides notebook users with the battery life of integrated graphics, but with the gaming performance of a discrete graphics processor.  PC manufacturers also are expected to launch hundreds of new PCs that use these new GeForce GPUs paired with Intel Corporation’s Sandy Bridge CPUs.

 

        During fiscal year 2011, we also announced our plans to develop a custom central processing unit, or CPU, that will use the ARM instruction set. These CPU cores will be integrated into future generation GPUs for PCs, servers, and supercomputers.  

 

   Professional Solutions Business



           During fiscal year 2011, our Quadro business benefitted from the strength of our Fermi architecture with the launch of the Quadro 2000 midrange GPU and the Quadro 600 entry-level GPU. These professional graphics solutions put the computational and visualization benefits of our Fermi architecture within reach of all engineers, designers and animators, with the Quadro 2000 delivering significantly higher performance across leading CAD applications and the Quadro 600 positioned at a competitive price/performance point.  The new Quadro GPUs deliver performance that is up to five times faster for 3D applications and up to eight times faster for computational simulation than our previous Quadro generation products.



   Our Tesla supercomputing business continued to make progress with key project wins not only in our core market segments, but also with traction in a number of new focus areas.  

   

   Consumer Products Business



   During fiscal year 2011, we saw promising signs in our Tegra business, helped by adoption to the Android operating system.  Tegra shipment volumes began to ramp up late in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2011 and we expect the momentum to continue into the first quarter of fiscal year 2012, fueled by the production release of Android-based smartphone and tablet products.  During the fiscal year 2011, we had multiple Tegra 2 design wins in both tablets and smartphones. Our