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NVIDIA Adds OpenCL to Its Industry Leading GPU Computing Toolkit

NVIDIA's Revolutionary CUDA Parallel Computing Architecture to Support OpenCL

SINGAPORE, Dec. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008 -- NVIDIA Corporation today announced its full support for the newly released OpenCL 1.0 specification from the Khronos Group. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a new compute API that allows developers to harness the massive parallel computing power of the GPU. The addition of OpenCL is another major milestone in the GPU revolution that gives NVIDIA developers another powerful programming option.

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NVIDIA kicked off the GPU computing revolution with the introduction of NVIDIA(R) CUDA(TM), its massively parallel computing ISA and hardware architecture. CUDA was designed to natively support all parallel computing interfaces and will seamlessly run OpenCL. Enabled on over 100 million NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA has unleashed unprecedented performance boosts across a wide range of applications and provides a huge installed base for the deployment of compute applications using OpenCL. With support for other industry standard languages such as C, Java, Fortran and Python, only the CUDA architecture provides developers with a choice of programming environments to aid the rapid development of compute applications on the GPU.

First introduced with the NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) 8800 GPU and standard across all NVIDIA's modern GPUs, CUDA is the foundation of NVIDIA's parallel computing strategy. CUDA has had a tremendous reception from the world's research community with scientists seeing up to a 20-200x speed-up in their applications with CUDA over a CPU. The CUDA architecture is being built into a wide range of computing systems from supercomputers and workstations to consumer PCs, enabling more than 25,000 developers to actively develop on CUDA today.

"The arrival of OpenCL is fabulous news for the computing industry and NVIDIA is delighted to be playing a highly active role in the establishment of a new standard that promotes computing on the GPU," said Manju Hegde, general manager of CUDA at NVIDIA. "We are delighted that Apple has helped spearhead OpenCL. Their recognition that the GPU will now play an essential role in consumer applications is a significant milestone in the history of computing."

Vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA, Neil Trevett also holds the position of chair of the OpenCL working group at Khronos.

"The OpenCL specification is a result of a clearly recognized opportunity from leaders like NVIDIA to grow the total market for heterogeneous parallel computing through an open, cross-platform standard," said Trevett. "NVIDIA will continue to be very active in the OpenCL working group to drive the evolution of the specification and will support OpenCL on all its platforms, providing developers an additional way to tap into the awesome computational power of our GPUs."

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers,

game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce(R) graphics products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro(R) graphics products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla(TM) computing solutions products. NVIDIA is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. and has offices throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas. For more information, visit http://www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: NVIDIA's support of OpenCL; the GPU computing revolution and the effect of CUDA architecture and Open CL on the GPU computing revolution; the benefits, features, impact, and capabilities of OpenCL, CUDA architecture and NVIDIA GeForce GPUs; are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; adoption of the CPU for parallel processing; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended October 26, 2008. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

Copyright (C) 2008 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, GeForce, Quadro, Tesla, CUDA are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

Web site: http://www.nvidia.com/