SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NVIDIA Corporation, the inventor of the GPU, today announced the release of its OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) to developers participating in its OpenCL Early Access Program. NVIDIA is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.

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"The OpenCL standard was developed on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA was the first company to demonstrate OpenCL code running on a GPU," said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of technology and content at NVIDIA. "Being the first to release an OpenCL driver to developers cements NVIDIA's leadership in GPU Computing and is another key milestone in our ongoing strategy to make the GPU the soul of the modern PC."

At the core of NVIDIA(R)'s GPU Computing strategy is the massively parallel CUDA(TM) architecture that NVIDIA pioneered and has been shipping since 2006. Accessible today through familiar industry standard programming environments such as C, Java, Fortran and Python, the CUDA architecture supports all manner of computational interfaces and, as such, is a perfect complement to OpenCL. Enabled on over 100 million NVIDIA GPUs, the CUDA architecture is enabling developers to innovate with the GPU and unleash never before seen performance across a wide range of applications.

Developers can apply to become a GPU Computing Registered Developer at: www.nvidia.com/opencl

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 www.nvidia.com.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, features, impact, and capabilities of the OpenCL driver and CUDA architecture; and our strategies, 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; changes in our strategies 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-K for the fiscal period ended January 25, 2009. 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.

(C) 2009 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, CUDA, GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla are trademarks 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. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

SOURCE NVIDIA Corporation