NVIDIA Announces 2nd Gen Maximus Technology

NVIDIA announces the launch of its 2nd generation of its workstation platform, NVIDIA Maximus. By introducing the Kepler architecture aspect to the existing technology in the form of the new Tesla K20 GPU, as well as the new Quadro K5000, the company promises to deliver even better performances with the updated platform.

As a companion to the Quadro K5000, the new Tesla K20 GPU, that was first unveiled at the company's GTC 2012 early this year,  will be made available in December this year with a MSRP of US$3,199.

Benefits of Kepler Architecture (Quadro K5000)

With the introduction of Kepler architecture technology to the 2nd generation of NVIDIA Maximus platform, the company has brought its performance and efficiency directly to professionals who need such visualization and computation capabilities in a single system. The Quadro K5000 is the graphical processing hub of the Maximus system and its key features include many of those found on the desktop class GeForce 6 series such as the following:-

Bindless Textures

With Bindless Textures, texture shaders are able to reference over 1 million textures directly in memory to enable vastly more different materials and richer texture detail in rendered scenes, while reducing CPU overheads.

FXAA/TXAA

The Quadro K5000 is able to support FXAA/TXAA for cinematic anti-aliasing (AA) effects that are on par with 8x anti-aliasing. Such rich visual effects are achieved with lesser overheads than the traditional AA techniques.

Multi-Display

With its updated display engines, a single Quadro K5000 is capable to driving up to four displays. Coupled with NVIDIA's Quadro Sync and Quadro Mosaic, its video output capabilities can be expanded to projectors for large format display requirements.

Benefits of Kepler Architecture (Tesla K20)

With the additional of the Tesla K20 GPU to the NVIDIA Maximus system, the compute work is channeled away from the CPU as well as the Quadro K5000. The Maximus set of software and drivers is able to transparently and automatically assign visualization, simulation or rendering work to the right GPU. According to NVIDIA, the 2nd generation Maximus technology is capable of reducing overheads to the system's CPU as well. The feature highlights of the Tesla K20 include the following aspects that enthusiasts would have already been familiar from the desktop GeForce 6 series:-

SMX

SMX promises to deliver more performance, due to its higher number of CUDA cores, than the Fermi architecture and it will deliver the stipulated level of performance with less power; in fact, it is touted to be three times as efficient as the previous generation SM.

Dynamic Parallelism

The Tesla K20 GPU supports Dynamic Parallelism and Hyper-Q technologies, making it easier for GPU developers to speed up all parallel recursive loops, resulting in the Kepler GPU being able to create its own jobs without having to go back to the CPU for such instructions. This will allow the compute work to be sped up, while at the same time reducing computing overheads at the system's CPU.

NVIDIA Maximus Ecosystem Support

The world’s leading workstation OEMs including HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu, together with systems integrators such as BOXX Technologies and Supermicro – will offer second generation NVIDIA Maximus-powered workstations.

The software vendors who will certify and support these NVIDIA Maximus-powered workstations include Adobe, ANSYS, Autodesk, Bunkspeed, Dassault Systèmes, MathWorks and Paradigm.

In conclusion, it seems that NVIDIA has attempted to garner both hardware and software support for its 2nd-generation Maximus platform. Besides banking on the end-users of software offered by the above mentioned vendors, to increase the acceptance of its updated platform, we feel that the company should also target the GPU developers beyond these major software players by making the Maximus platform and its APIs more open and transparent. This will make it easier for these developers to leverage on the Maximus platform of software and drivers, as well as the CUDA framework, to ensure that their programs coded are optimized to run on these Maximus rigs.

(Source: NVIDIA)

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