| Nvidia Tesla | |
| Manufacturer: | Nvidia |
| Type: | General purpose graphics cards |
| Discontinued: | The brand Tesla discontinued on, now branded as Nvidia Data Center GPUs |
Nvidia Tesla is the former name for a line of products developed by Nvidia targeted at stream processing or general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began using GPUs from the G80 series, and have continued to accompany the release of new chips. They are programmable using the CUDA or OpenCL APIs.
The Nvidia Tesla product line competed with AMD's Radeon Instinct and Intel Xeon Phi lines of deep learning and GPU cards.
Nvidia retired the Tesla brand in May 2020, reportedly because of potential confusion with the brand of cars.[1] Its new GPUs are branded Nvidia Data Center GPUs[2] as in the Ampere-based A100 GPU.[3]
Nvidia DGX servers feature Nvidia GPGPUs.
Offering computational power much greater than traditional microprocessors, the Tesla products targeted the high-performance computing market.[4], Nvidia Teslas power some of the world's fastest supercomputers, including Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Tianhe-1A, in Tianjin, China.
Tesla cards have four times the double precision performance of a Fermi-based Nvidia GeForce card of similar single precision performance.Unlike Nvidia's consumer GeForce cards and professional Nvidia Quadro cards, Tesla cards were originally unable to output images to a display. However, the last Tesla C-class products included one Dual-Link DVI port.[5]
Tesla products are primarily used in simulations and in large-scale calculations (especially floating-point calculations), and for high-end image generation for professional and scientific fields.[6]
In 2013, the defense industry accounted for less than one-sixth of Tesla sales, but Sumit Gupta predicted increasing sales to the geospatial intelligence market.[7]