Forbes Names Nvidia 'Company of the Year'

Nvidia has been named 'Company of the Year' by Forbes magazine. In selecting the visual computing major for its cover story, Forbes described Nvidia as leading "the breakneck, highly lucrative graphics chip business, giving high definition to Web videos, and bringing a visual kick to digital video games."

Forbes highlighted the rapid proliferation of 3D applications such as Google Earth as an area of continuing growth for the company: "As bandwidth becomes cheap and ubiquitous, people will want 3D power as much online as they do now in desktop games, and the demand for graphics processors will grow."

Referencing Nvidia’s recent entry into high-performance computing, Forbes reported that the company is focusing on "a host of new customers that will need number-crunching power: oil companies doing deep-sea seismic analysis, Wall Street banks modeling portfolio risk, and biologists visualizing molecular structures to find drug target sites.

"Pricing 150,000 equity options in a second or assessing how much crude oil sits in a pocket 6 miles below the earth's surface are massively parallel mathematical computing problems for which graphics processors are peculiarly equipped," it added.

Nvidia was selected from an initial list of over 1000 companies. Forbes editors reviewed the 'Platinum 400' list of best-managed companies in the US, considering financial performance as well as factors such as management ability, innovation, and leadership.