This week we talk about AMD, graphics processing units, and AI.We also discuss crypto mining, video games, and parallel processing.Recommended Book: The Story of Art Without Men by Katy HesselTranscriptFounded in 1993 by an engineer who previously designed microprocessors for semiconductor company AMD, an engineer from Sun Microsystems, and a graphics chip designer and senior engineer from Sun and IBM, NVIDIA was focused on producing graphics-optimized hardware because of a theory held by those founders that this sort of engineering would allow computers to tackle new sorts of problems that conventional computing architecture wasn't very good at. They also suspected that the video game industry, which was still pretty nascent, but rapidly growing, this being the early 90s, would become a big deal, and the industry was already running up against hardware problems, computing-wise, both in terms of development, and in terms of allowing users to play games that were graphically complex and immersive.So they scrounged about $40k between them, started the company, and then fairly quickly were able to attract serious funding from Silicon Valley VCs, initially to the tune of $20 million. It took them a little while, about half a decade, to get their first real-deal product out the door, but a graphics accelerator chip they release in 1998 did pretty well, and their subsequent product, the GeForce 256, which empowered consumer-grade hardware to do impressive new things, graphically, made their company, and their GeForce line of graphics cards, into an industry standard piece of hardware for gaming purposes.Graphics cards, those of the dedicated or discrete variety, which basically means it's a separate piece of hardware from the motherboard, the main computer hardware, gives a computer or other device enhanced graphics powers, lending it the ability to process graphical stuff separately, with tech optimized for that purpose, which in turn means you can play games or videos or whatnot that would otherwise be sluggish or low-quality, or in some cases, it allows you to play games and videos that your core system simply wouldn't be capable of handling. These cards are circuit boards that are installed into a computer's expansion slot, or in some cases attached using a high-speed connection cable.Many modern video games require dedicated graphics processors of this kind in order to function, or in order to function at a playable speed and resolution; lower-key, simpler games work decently well with the graphics capabilities included in the core hardware, but the AAA-grade, high-end, visually realistic stuff almost always needs this kind of add-on to work, or to work as intended.And these sorts of add-ons have been around since personal computers have been around, but they really took off on the consumer market in the 1980s, as PCs started to become more visual—the advent of Windows and the Mac made what was previously a green-screen, number and character-heavy interface a lot more colorful and interactive and intuitive for non-programmer users, and as those visual experiences became more complex, the hardware architecture had to evolve to account for that, and often this meant including graphics cards alongside the more standard components.A huge variety of companies make these sorts of cards, these days, but the majority of modern graphics cards are designed by one of two companies: AMD or Nvidia.What I'd like to talk about today is the latter, Nvidia, a company that seems to have found itself in the right place at the right time, with the right investments and infrastructure, to take advantage of a new wave of companies and applications that desperately need what it has to offer.—Like most tech companies, Nvidia has been slowly but surely expanding its capabilities and competing with other entities in this space by snapping up other businesses that do things it would like to be able to do.It bought-out the intellectual assets of 3dfx, a f