Tesla (microarchitecture)

Nvidia Tesla

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 of the GeForce 200-line of graphics-cards, was the final major iteration featuring the Tesla microarchitecture (GT200-400-B3).
Release date	November 2006
Fabrication process	90 nm, 80 nm, 65 nm, 55 nm, and 40 nm
History
Predecessor	Curie
Successor	Fermi
Support status
Unsupported

Tesla is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 2006, as the successor to Curie microarchitecture. It was named after the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. As 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, collectively manufactured in 90 nm, 80 nm, 65 nm, 55 nm, and 40 nm. It was also in the GeForce 405 and in the Quadro FX, Quadro x000, Quadro NVS series, and Nvidia Tesla computing modules.

Tesla replaced the old fixed-pipeline microarchitectures, represented at the time of introduction by the GeForce 7 series. It competed directly with AMD's first unified shader microarchitecture named TeraScale, a development of ATI's work on the Xbox 360 which used a similar design. Tesla was followed by Fermi.