Tesla (microarchitecture)

Tesla is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to their prior microarchitectures. Tesla is Nvidia's first microarchitecture to implement unified shaders. It was used with GeForce 8 Series, GeForce 9 Series, GeForce 100 Series, GeForce 200 Series, and GeForce 300 Series of GPUs manufactured in 90 nm, 80 nm, 65 nm, and 55 nm. It also found use in the GeForce 405, and in the workstation market in the Quadro FX, Quadro x000, Quadro NVS series, and Nvidia Tesla computing modules. Tesla replaced the old fixed-pipeline microarchitectures and competed directly with AMD's first unified shader microarchitecture named TeraScale. Tesla was followed by Fermi.

The Tesla series takes its name from pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla.

Overview

Tesla is Nvidia's first microarchitecture implementing the unified shader model. The driver supports Direct3D 10 Shader Model 4.0 / OpenGL 2.1(later drivers have OpenGL 3.3 support) architecture. The design is a major shift for NVIDIA in GPU functionality and capability, the most obvious change being the move from the separate functional units (pixel shaders, vertex shaders) within previous GPUs to a homogeneous collection of universal floating point processors (called "stream processors") that can perform a more universal set of tasks.

Nvidia Tesla

Nvidia Tesla is Nvidia's brand name for their products targeting stream processing and/or general purpose GPU. Products use GPUs from the G80 series onward. Both the underlying microarchitecture of the initial GPUs "Tesla" and the Tesla product line take their name from pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla.

Overview

With their very high computational power (measured in floating point operations per second or FLOPS) compared to microprocessors, the Tesla products target the high performance computing market.As of 2012, Nvidia Teslas power some of the world's fastest supercomputers, including Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Tianhe-1A, in Tianjin, China.

The lack of ability to output images to a display was the main difference between Tesla products and the consumer level GeForce cards and the professional level Quadro cards, but the latest Tesla C-class products include one Dual-Link DVI port. For equivalent single precision output, Fermi-based Nvidia GeForce cards have four times less dual-precision performance. Tesla products primarily operate:

Nvidia

Coordinates: 37°22′14.62″N 121°57′49.46″W / 37.3707278°N 121.9637389°W / 37.3707278; -121.9637389

NVIDIA Corporation (/ɪnˈvɪdiə/ in-VID-eeə) (commonly referred to as Nvidia, stylized as NVIDIA, nVIDIA or nVidia) began as an American technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming market, as well as system on a chip units (SOCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Nvidia's primary GPU product line, labeled "GeForce", is in direct competition with Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD) "Radeon" products. Nvidia expanded its presence in the gaming industry with its handheld SHIELD Portable, SHIELD Tablet, and SHIELD Android TV.

Since 2014, Nvidia has shifted to become a platform company focused on four markets - Gaming, Professional Visualization, Data Centers and Auto.

In addition to GPU manufacturing, Nvidia provides parallel processing capabilities to researchers and scientists that allow them to efficiently run high-performance applications. They are deployed in supercomputing sites around the world. More recently, Nvidia has moved into the mobile computing market, where it produces Tegra mobile processors for smartphones and tablets, as well as vehicle navigation and entertainment systems. In addition to AMD, its competitors include Intel and Qualcomm.

Trademark

A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a recognizable sign, design, or expression which identifies products or services of a particular source from those of others, although trademarks used to identify services are usually called service marks. The trademark owner can be an individual, business organization, or any legal entity. A trademark may be located on a package, a label, a voucher, or on the product itself. For the sake of corporate identity, trademarks are being displayed on company buildings.

Usage

A trademark identifies the brand owner of a particular product or service. Trademarks can be licensed to others; for example, Bullyland obtained a license to produce Smurf figurines; the Lego Group purchased a license from Lucasfilm in order to be allowed to launch Lego Star Wars; TT Toys Toys is a manufacturer of licensed ride-on replica cars for children. The unauthorized usage of trademarks by producing and trading counterfeit consumer goods is known as brand piracy.

The owner of a trademark may pursue legal action against trademark infringement. Most countries require formal registration of a trademark as a precondition for pursuing this type of action. The United States, Canada and other countries also recognize common law trademark rights, which means action can be taken to protect an unregistered trademark if it is in use. Still common law trademarks offer the holder in general less legal protection than registered trademarks.

GeForce 9 series

The GeForce 9 series is the ninth generation of NVIDIA's GeForce series of graphics processing units, the first of which was released on February 21, 2008. Products are based on a slightly repolished Tesla microarchitecture, adding PCIe 2.0 support, improved color and z-compression, and built on a 65 nm process, later using 55 nm process to reduce power consumption and die size (GeForce 8 G8x GPUs only supported PCIe 1.1 and were built on 90 nm process or 80 nm process).

GeForce 9300 Series

Geforce 9100 G

Geforce 9300 GS

On May 1, 2008 the GeForce 9300 GS was officially launched.