By Dan Olds, Gabriel Consulting
2010 was the breakout year for Nvidia’s Tesla division, according to Tesla VP Andy Keane, who spoke at the company’s Industry Analyst Day earlier this month. I think it’s pretty obvious that he’s right, and a quick review of the last year tells the story.

Three of the top five systems on the Top500 list sport Nvidia GPU accelerators. At SC10, Tesla GPUs were everywhere. They showed up in almost every hardware vendor booth, and most of the ISVs were either boasting about a CUDA-enabled piece of their application or discussing their future plans for it.

In his talk, Keane pulled back the covers further than I’ve seen before in any semi-public forum. He shared strategy and tactics, and even broke out some pretty impressive numbers for us. In Nvidia’s fiscal 2009 (which is mostly our calendar year 2008), Tesla revenue was about $10m for the year. It more than doubled to $25m in FY10 and quadrupled in FY11 (just completed) to top $100 million.

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