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NVIDIA announces new Quadro professional graphics cards: M6000, K1200 and Quadro VCA

By Vijay Anand & John Law - on 20 Mar 2015, 10:40am

NVIDIA announces new Quadro professional graphics cards: M6000, K1200 and Quadro VCA

NVIDIA demonstrating an event called the London Death Ray, via the use of their new VCA, which is powered by several Quadro M6000 graphics cards.

Remember NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX Titan X just a few days ago? Something seemed amiss that NVIDIA stopped at just launching a high-end gaming and personal research card at their biggest GPU event of the year. That was soon corrected when we attended another press session where NVIDIA announced the release of its latest professional graphics solutions, the Quadro M6000 and the Quadro K1200.

The Quadro M6000 is the latest top-of-the-line professional workstation graphics card, and it is a powerhouse of a card in comparison with the previous generation Quadro K6000. The card’s graphics architecture is based on NVIDIA’s latest Maxwell architecture that was first featured on the GeForce GTX 980, which is also more power efficient than the previous generation Kepler (such as the GPU used on the Quadro K6000).

The new Quadro M6000 professional workstation graphics card ...

... and its specifications.

The new Quadro M6000 is helping companies like BMW to pre-render their upcoming models with exceeding amounts of detail.

To be specific, the Quadro M6000 is using the same GPU that's used in the just launched GeForce GTX Titan X. As such, the GPU is manufactured on a 28nm process, fitted with 3,072 CUDA cores, and still retains the same massive 12GB GDDR5 video memory, which Sandeep Gupte, Senior Director of NVIDIA’s Professional Solutions Group, said will run at a bandwidth of 317GB/s. Just like the technical capabilities of the GeForce GTX Titan X, It’s designed for single precision computation and calculations, with calculations speeds reaching up to 7 Tera FLOPS (Floating Operating Points per Second), and will have a rated board design power of 250W. 

Sandeep told us that the new card is powerful enough that it is able to render real-life objects not only more accurately, but also much faster than before. He says that this fast rendering capability of the card will be beneficial to graphics designers, because it can also cut cost for companies by allowing them to virtually see what their finished product would look like before they actually make a physical render of it. Speaking of visualizing content, the Quadro M6000 is also capable of driving four 4K displays simultaneously.

Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is one of the few customers that NVIDIA provides the first Quadro cards to when they become available. And yes, that is a graphics designer working on the upcoming Star Wars film.

The card can also be used to render virtual images, characters and backgrounds in real-time, such as movies or video games. Also, yes, the image above is a shot of an Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) graphics designer working on the new Star Wars film using an NVIDIA Quadro M6000. And yes, by the looks of it, it seems that C-3PO and R2D2 will once again be making an appearance in the upcoming movie too.

Sandeep said that the price of the Quadro M6000 will be the same as the K6000 when it first released. However, he did not specify the official release date for the card.

The new Quadro K1200 is designed to fit into a compact workstation.

The Quadro K1200 is a half-height professional graphics card with 512 CUDA cores in its GM107 GPU SKU, 4GB graphics memory and has a 45W thermal design profile.

The second card to be announced at the press conference was the Quadro K1200, a small-size professional graphics card that is designed for compact workstations. Like the M6000, the K1200 is also based off the Maxwell processor architecture (more specifically, the first generation Maxwell variant featured on the GM107). Inside, the card is fitted with a 2GB GDDR3 of graphics memory with a rated memory bandwidth of 28.8GB/s. No pricing or release date was given for the Quadro K1200, but we will update this page with the information as soon as we get it.

The new Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) is kitted out with eight Quadro M6000 professional graphics cards.

The third and final product that was announced by Sandeep was the company’s updated Visual Computing Appliance (VCA). Called the Quadro VCA, this server-grade workstation is a system that is designed to handle heavy-duty computations and calculations, both in pre-rendering and in real-time. The Quadro VCA is sold in a rackmount form factor, and each contains eight Quadro M6000 GPUs, 256GB of memory, 2TB worth of SSDs, and comes pre-installed with Linux CentOS 6.6, Iray 2015, OptiX, V-Ray RT, and VCA Manager. More detailed specs of the Quadro VCA can be found here.

The new Quadro VCA will be sold for US$50,000 and availability details to be announced at a later date.

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