16 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American 3D graphics company that was the dominant consumer GPU company in the late 1990s — before Nvidia's superior product execution and business model (selling chips to board manufacturers vs. 3dfx's direct board sales) led to its collapse and acquisition by Nvidia.
American semiconductor company founded by Jerry Sanders in 1969 — which has competed with Intel in CPUs and Nvidia in GPUs — and which under Lisa Su's leadership (from 2014) executed one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in semiconductor history.
American semiconductor executive who was recruited from Motorola to lead Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968 — at the enormous salary of $1M, shocking the industry — a hire that destabilized Fairchild just as Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were preparing to leave to found Intel.
American semiconductor and AI infrastructure analyst — founder of SemiAnalysis — the most detailed independent analyst of AI chip supply chains, datacenter infrastructure, and the business of AI hardware.
American semiconductor company founded in 1957 by the Traitorous Eight (Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, and others) after leaving Shockley Semiconductor — which developed the first commercially viable integrated circuit and spawned Silicon Valley's semiconductor ecosystem.
American semiconductor company co-founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce in 1968 — which built the dominant microprocessor franchise (x86 architecture) and ruled the CPU market for 50 years — before AMD and ARM challenged its desktop dominance and Nvidia's GPU became the critical AI computing chip.
Taiwanese-American entrepreneur — co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA — who built NVIDIA from a gaming GPU company into the foundational infrastructure company of the AI revolution — whose H100 and A100 chips became the 'shovels in the AI gold rush.'
American semiconductor company founded by Wilf Corrigan in 1981 — which pioneered Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and storage controllers — and where Jensen Huang worked as a director of LSI's microprocessor group before co-founding Nvidia.
American electronics company founded by Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 — which produced the first mobile phone (Martin Cooper, 1973), the 68000 microprocessor (used in early Macs), and Motorola Solutions (communications) — before being acquired by Google and then Lenovo.
Jensen Huang's Santa Clara semiconductor company — creator of the GPU and CUDA platform — the company whose chips power virtually all AI model training — briefly became the most valuable company in the world in 2024.
American technology executive and CEO of ARM Holdings since 2022, who oversees the chip IP licensing company whose architecture runs in virtually every smartphone in the world.
American graphics card company that was one of the early leaders in PC add-in graphics cards — and which was acquired by 3dfx in 1999 in a move that helped accelerate 3dfx's collapse and Nvidia's rise to dominance.
South Korean multinational conglomerate founded in 1938 — and the world's largest manufacturer of consumer electronics, semiconductors, and display panels — whose Galaxy smartphone line is Apple's primary competitor and whose semiconductor foundry is a critical global infrastructure provider.
William Shockley's semiconductor research laboratory founded in Mountain View, California in 1956 — which assembled the best solid-state physics talent in the world in the Santa Clara Valley — and from which the Traitorous Eight departed to found Fairchild Semiconductor.
American semiconductor company based in Dallas — which developed the first integrated circuit (Jack Kilby, 1958) and the first pocket calculator (1967) — and which became a major producer of digital signal processors and embedded processors.
American physicist who led the Bell Labs team that invented the transistor — sharing the 1956 Nobel Prize — and who founded Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto, creating the talent concentration that spawned Fairchild Semiconductor and then the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem.