Introduction

NVIDIA releases a new product, on average, every 6 months. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But what goes on behind the scenes to make this happen? Earlier this week, we had the opportunity to find out exactly what happens behind NVIDIA’s closed doors. We were given almost unrestricted access to NVIDIA’s many labs and their high-performance computing center; what we saw was impressive.

We were essentially given unfiltered access to see and talk with the people at NVIDIA. The engineers did not have to turn off their monitors when we walked into their labs. We were simply asked to black out any parts of the image that could reveal confidential information.

NVIDIA’s Santa Clara campus is actually the third building the NVIDIA employees have called home. They started just down the street from the original Fry’s Electronics in Sunnyvale, before moving to Apple’s old facilities in Santa Clara. These offices had the capability to support about 500 employees or so. They finally moved to their current offices in 2001. They’ve spent the last six years there, growing from GeForce 4 to today’s GeForce 8 series.

There has been talk about NVIDIA moving yet another time to San Jose, but it’ll be up to the city to offer a good enough financial package to get the NVIDIA team to move yet another time. As it stands, NVIDIA will continue to expand and grow at their Santa Clara HQ.

Most of NVIDIA is made up of cubicles; the newer cubicles have shorter walls.
But the real magic happens here: