Nvidia Announces Fermi-based Quadro Lineup

Posted 07/27/2010 at 7:57am | by Michael Brown

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Nvidia announced at SIGGRAPH today a new line of Quadro workstation graphics cards based on its Fermi general-purporse GPU. Nvidia claims the new lineup will enable designers to create three-dimensional designs with five times the complexity of any hardware currently on the market.

"For most workstation applications, geometry is critical, but the ability to generate complex geometry has flat-lined,” said Scott Fitzpatrick, product-line manager for Nvidia’s Quadro business unit. “A Quadro 6000-based workstation will be able to produce four times as much geometry as anything in our history. This will enable workstations to create designs that are five times more complex than ever before.” The new GPUs will deliver an 8x performance boost when producing simulations, according to Fitzpatrick.

Nvidia's Fermi-based Quadro cards are designed for use in design and engineering workstations.

The Quadro 4000 ($1,199) will feature 256 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory when it ships in August. The Quadro 5000 ($2,249) bumps the CUDA core count to 352 and comes with with 2.5GB of GDDR5 memory. The Quadro 5000 ($4,999) will include stereovision in the form of Nvidia’s 3D Vision Pro emitter and LCD shutter glasses (this will be a no-cost option on the Quadro 4000). Unlike the consumer version, which relies on USB, the 3DVision Pro emitter will plug directly into the card via a three-pin cable. The shutter glasses, meanwhile, will utilize RF communication in order to eliminate any line-of-sight requirement while increasing the range to 100 feet. The stereovision kit will ship in October.

An emitter for Nvidia's LCD shutter glasses connect directly to the Quadro's mounting bracket, in contrast to consumer-oriented models that rely on USB.

The top-of-the-line Quadro 6000 is also shipping October. This card will feature 448 CUDA cores, a whopping 6GB of GDDR5 memory, and a 3D Vision Pro kit. If that doesn’t provide enough horsepower for your engineering and modeling needs, Nvidia’s QuadroPlex 7000 ($14,500) will bundle two Quadro 6000 cards in SLI in an external module to deliver 896 CUDA cores and an aggregate 12GB of GDDR5 memory.