Kepler in the Workstation: Nvidia Rolls Out New Quadros

Last summer at SIGGRAPH, Nvidia introduced its initial releases of the Kepler-based Quadros, in the K5000 desktop card and the Kx000M series of Kepler-based Quadro GPUs for mobile workstations.

Now Nvidia is introducing the rest of the family for its desktop Kepler-based Quadro cards: the entry-level K600 (which is also configurable to fit in small form factor chassis), the K2000 (and K2000D dual-DVI variant), and the K4000, all filling in the space in the product line left underneath the K5000. The update brings more CUDA cores, more memory and faster memory to the entire product line.

More CUDA Cores

The Kepler architecture's increased single-precision floating point performance means the new cards will provide triple (or better) the CUDA performance for compute tasks over their predecessors. Single-precision floating point tasks include most GPU-based 3D rendering, and tasks like CUDA effects rendering in Premiere. For instance, with the Quadro K5000, single-precision floating -point performance is increased to 2,150 GFLOPS over its predecessor's 718 GFLOPS, and the Quadro K4000 has 1,246 GFLOPS, a 2.56x improvement over its predecessor's 486 GFLOPS. The additional memory in the new cards will also directly affect compute performance, as one of the primary limiting factors in GPU-based 3d rendering is the amount of memory on the card... see how easily the GPU memory of the Fermi-based Quadro 2000 was overwhelmed in the system we reviewed here.

More Displays, More Flexible Arrangement

Except the entry-level K600, all of the new cards double the number of active displays from two to four displays. NVIDIA is also updating their Mosaic technology to make it easier and better to manage large multi-display workspaces, and with four diaplays on four cards, you can get sixteen displays working as a single workspace.

Maximus Expanded

The release of the new Kepler-based Quadro cards also expands the configurations possible to use as next-generation Maximus configurations accompanied by the Tesla K20. Technically, the current preferred configuration for Maximus is a Quadro K5000 with the Tesla K20, but NVIDIA is now supporting configurations with the other Kepler-based Quadro cards for those that need more compute capability and less real-time 3d capability in their workstations.

Availability and Pricing

These new Kepler-based Quadro cards are available immediately. The Quadro K4000 is priced at $1,269; the Quadro K2000 and K2000D at $599; and the K600 is $199

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