Show me the money
NVIDIA’s acquisition of PhysX company AGEIA has been completed a mere 11 days after it was first announced. While the sums of money involved still haven’t been disclosed, cash clearly wasn’t a sticking point in closing the deal.
In a conference call today, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced that the PhysX engine would be incorporated into CUDA – NVIDIA's API (application programming interface) for the general purpose GPU (GPGPU) – a technology that allows graphics processors to do jobs that normally only CPUs would do. In effect, every GPU that is CUDA enabled will be able to run PhysX, when it comes, with just a software download. All of its latest 8-series GPUs run CUDA.
On a busy day for NVIDIA press releases, it also announced that membership of its PartnerForce channel programme tripled last year and that it's planning to expand it further this year, including hosting its first global PartnerForce conference in San Jose, California on 25th August. They then went and ruined it by referring to PartnerForce as an "end-to-end channel ecosystem". Never knowingly under-clichéd.
It also revealed that it raked in some pretty decent amounts of cash last year, with revenue standing at $4.1 billion for the year (technically feb to feb for some reason), up a cool billion from the year before. Net income was just short of $800 million, a 78 per cent increase on the year before.
Perhaps some of this will be spent on ramping up its marketing. Advertising Age has cited the ubiquitous “executives familiar with the situation” as its source for the rumour that NVIDIA plans to splurge up to $40 million on a great big consumer ad campaign, with the suggested aim of giving Intel a run for its money.
Apparently NVIDIA only spent $353,000 in measured media in the first nine months of 2007, but is now on the hunt for an ad agency. However, NVIDIA PR boss Derek Perez is quoted as saying: "We do not have an agency ... and we're not looking for one. We're just talking with people and companies about new ideas, like we always do."
Elsewhere, Bosnian tech journo Fudo has cited “sources very close to the company” for the rumour that NVIDIA spent up to $5 million dollars on the marketing of the game: Crysis. He concludes that he would like to have seen the money spent on independent publishers instead. Hear, hear.
Further reading: Opinion: What AGEIA deal means for AMD
Press releases:
NVIDIA COMPLETES ACQUISITION OF AGEIA TECHNOLOGIES
NVIDIA Channel Program goes Global
NVIDIA Reports Record Results for Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2008
