This is a list of eponyms of Nvidia GPU microarchitectures. The eponym in this case is the person after whom an architecture is named. Listed are the person, their portrait, their profession or areas of expertise, their birth year, their death year, their country of origin, the microarchitecture named after them, and the year of release of the GPU architecture.
Eponym | Profession | Origin | Architecture | Release year | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) | Physicist and mathematician | French | Ampere | 2020 | [1] |
David Blackwell (1919–2010) | Mathematician and statistician | American | Blackwell | 2024 | [2] |
Anders Celsius (1701–1744) | Physicist and astronomer | Swedish | Celsius | 1999 | |
Marie Curie (1867–1934) | Physicist and chemist | Curie | 2004 | [3] | |
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736) | Physicist | Polish Naturalized Dutch | Fahrenheit | 1998 | |
Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) | Physicist | Fermi | 2010 | [4] | |
Grace Hopper (1906–1992) | Computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral | American | Hopper | 2022 | [5] |
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824–1907) | Mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer | British | Kelvin | 2001 | |
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) | Astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music | German | Kepler | 2012 | [6] |
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) | Mathematician and writer | English | Ada Lovelace | 2022 | [7] |
James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) | Mathematician and scientist | Scottish | Maxwell | 2014 | [8] |
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) | Mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer | French | Pascal | 2016 | [9] |
William Rankine (1820–1872) | Mechanical engineer | Scottish | Rankine | 2003 | |
Vera Rubin (1928–2016) | Astronomer | American | Rubin | 2026 | [10] |
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) | Inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist | Serbian American | Tesla | 2006 | [11] |
Alan Turing (1912–1954) | Mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist | English | Turing | 2018 | [12] |
Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) | Physicist, chemist | Italian | Volta | 2017 | [13] |
GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed by Nvidia and marketed for the performance market. As of the GeForce 40 series, there have been eighteen iterations of the design. The first GeForce products were discrete GPUs designed for add-on graphics boards, intended for the high-margin PC gaming market, and later diversification of the product line covered all tiers of the PC graphics market, ranging from cost-sensitive GPUs integrated on motherboards, to mainstream add-in retail boards. Most recently, GeForce technology has been introduced into Nvidia's line of embedded application processors, designed for electronic handhelds and mobile handsets.
The GeForce 700 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. While mainly a refresh of the Kepler microarchitecture, some cards use Fermi (GF) and later cards use Maxwell (GM). GeForce 700 series cards were first released in 2013, starting with the release of the GeForce GTX Titan on February 19, 2013, followed by the GeForce GTX 780 on May 23, 2013. The first mobile GeForce 700 series chips were released in April 2013.
The GeForce 800M series is a family of graphics processing units by Nvidia for laptop PCs. It consists of rebrands of mobile versions of the GeForce 700 series and some newer chips that are lower end compared to the rebrands.
Kepler is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, first introduced at retail in April 2012, as the successor to the Fermi microarchitecture. Kepler was Nvidia's first microarchitecture to focus on energy efficiency. Most GeForce 600 series, most GeForce 700 series, and some GeForce 800M series GPUs were based on Kepler, all manufactured in 28 nm. Kepler found use in the GK20A, the GPU component of the Tegra K1 SoC, and in the Quadro Kxxx series, the Quadro NVS 510, and Tesla computing modules.
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.
Maxwell is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to the Kepler microarchitecture. The Maxwell architecture was introduced in later models of the GeForce 700 series and is also used in the GeForce 800M series, GeForce 900 series, and Quadro Mxxx series, as well as some Jetson products.
NVLink is a wire-based serial multi-lane near-range communications link developed by Nvidia. Unlike PCI Express, a device can consist of multiple NVLinks, and devices use mesh networking to communicate instead of a central hub. The protocol was first announced in March 2014 and uses a proprietary high-speed signaling interconnect (NVHS).
Pascal is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, as the successor to the Maxwell architecture. The architecture was first introduced in April 2016 with the release of the Tesla P100 (GP100) on April 5, 2016, and is primarily used in the GeForce 10 series, starting with the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, which were released on May 27, 2016, and June 10, 2016, respectively. Pascal was manufactured using TSMC's 16 nm FinFET process, and later Samsung's 14 nm FinFET process.
Volta is the codename, but not the trademark, for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, succeeding Pascal. It was first announced on a roadmap in March 2013, although the first product was not announced until May 2017. The architecture is named after 18th–19th century Italian chemist and physicist Alessandro Volta. It was Nvidia's first chip to feature Tensor Cores, specially designed cores that have superior deep learning performance over regular CUDA cores. The architecture is produced with TSMC's 12 nm FinFET process. The Ampere microarchitecture is the successor to Volta.
The GeForce 20 series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia. Serving as the successor to the GeForce 10 series, the line started shipping on September 20, 2018, and after several editions, on July 2, 2019, the GeForce RTX Super line of cards was announced.
Turing is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia. It is named after the prominent mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. The architecture was first introduced in August 2018 at SIGGRAPH 2018 in the workstation-oriented Quadro RTX cards, and one week later at Gamescom in consumer GeForce 20 series graphics cards. Building on the preliminary work of Volta, its HPC-exclusive predecessor, the Turing architecture introduces the first consumer products capable of real-time ray tracing, a longstanding goal of the computer graphics industry. Key elements include dedicated artificial intelligence processors and dedicated ray tracing processors. Turing leverages DXR, OptiX, and Vulkan for access to ray tracing. In February 2019, Nvidia released the GeForce 16 series GPUs, which utilizes the new Turing design but lacks the RT and Tensor cores.
Ampere is the codename for a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to both the Volta and Turing architectures. It was officially announced on May 14, 2020 and is named after French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère.
Intel Xe, earlier known unofficially as Gen12, is a GPU architecture developed by Intel.
Hopper is a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia. It is designed for datacenters and is used alongside the Lovelace microarchitecture. It is the latest generation of the line of products formerly branded as Nvidia Tesla, now Nvidia Data Centre GPUs.
The GeForce 30 series is a suite of graphics processing units (GPUs) designed and marketed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 20 series. The GeForce 30 series is based on the Ampere architecture, which features Nvidia's second-generation ray tracing (RT) cores and third-generation Tensor Cores. Through Nvidia RTX, hardware-enabled real-time ray tracing is possible on GeForce 30 series cards.
Rankine is the codename for a GPU microarchitecture developed by Nvidia, and released in 2003, as the successor to the Kelvin microarchitecture. It was named with reference to Macquorn Rankine and used with the GeForce FX series.
The GeForce 40 series is the most recent family of consumer-level graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, succeeding the GeForce 30 series. The series was announced on September 20, 2022, at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2022 event, and launched on October 12, 2022, starting with its flagship model, the RTX 4090.
Ada Lovelace, also referred to simply as Lovelace, is a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to the Ampere architecture, officially announced on September 20, 2022. It is named after the English mathematician Ada Lovelace, one of the first computer programmers. Nvidia announced the architecture along with the GeForce RTX 40 series consumer GPUs and the RTX 6000 Ada Generation workstation graphics card. The Lovelace architecture is fabricated on TSMC's custom 4N process which offers increased efficiency over the previous Samsung 8 nm and TSMC N7 processes used by Nvidia for its previous-generation Ampere architecture.
Blackwell is a graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture developed by Nvidia as the successor to the Hopper and Ada Lovelace microarchitectures.