Nvidia’s first fully-enabled GK110 arrives – Quadro K6000 packing 12GB of vRAM!

Nvidia is making an announcement today at SIGGRAPH that is important to gamers even though the card they are announcing is not usually used for gaming. Nvidia is announcing the visual computing industry’s new flagship technology – the Quadro K6000 GPU, the fastest and most capable GPU ever built.

What makes this especially impressive is that the new GK110-based GPU used in the Quadro K6000 is the 15 SMX-enabled, 2880 CUDA core GPU that is even more powerful than the gaming-oriented 14 SMX GeForce Titan. This card is a professional use card in every sense although DoublePrecision may be disabled in the Nvidia Control Panel and it can be used for gaming although gaming is not its purpose. Quadro K6000 is a professional card in every way and it is primarily designed for work in the entertainment, automotive and oil exploration industries.To compliment the workstation Quadro K6000, Nvidia has also launched a new line of professional graphics GPUs for mobile workstations which deliver the highest levels of performance and graphics memory available on mobile platforms. For example, the Quadro K5100M GPU is designed for the highest levels of performance and graphics memory available on notebook platforms and it anchors a new line of Nvidia workstation notebook graphics that includes the Quadro K4100M, K3100M, K2100M, K1100M, K610M, and K510M GPUs.

Quadro K6000 Specifications

Here are the K6000 specifications as it compares to Nvidia’s current Quadros. It simply runs away from the Fermi-based Quadros although it has a much higher TDP.

The Quadro K6000 GPU delivers five-times higher compute performance and nearly double the graphics capability of its predecessor, the Nvidia Quadro 6000 GPU, and is equipped with 12GB of GDDR5, the world’s largest and fastest graphics memory.
Combining high performance and advanced capabilities in a reasonably power-efficient design, the Quadro K6000 GPU enables leading organizations such as Pixar, Nissan, Apache Corporation and the Weather Channel’s WSI division to tackle visualization and analysis workloads much larger than previously.

Extreme Performance for Extreme Computing

Just as in gaming, faster performance is always better. The Quadro K6000 GPU, based on the Nvidia’s Kepler GK110 GPU, is the world’s fastest and most efficient GPU architecture. These features include:

• 12GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 graphics memory allows designers and animators to model and render scenes at a large scale and with great complexity
• 2,880 streaming multiprocessor CUDA cores in the fully 15 SMX-enabled GK110 GPU deliver faster visualization and compute power than Fermi-based Quadro products
• It supports four simultaneous displays and up to 4K resolution with DisplayPort 1.2
• Ultra-low latency video I/O and support for large-scale visualizations are featured.

The Need for Speed

In just three target industries – Entertainment, automotive and design, and exploration (oil/gas and weather modeling) – time is literally money and of the essence. All of these industries will benefit from a much faster Quadro just as gamers benefit from faster GeForce cards. However, in the above-named industries, it is crucial to be able to work faster and faster.

Entertainment

Nvidia uses Pixar as their example of the need to render scenes faster and with more detail. Generally, a scene goes through a 6-step process from story-board to final scene. It is of great advantage to be able to render all of the scenes in real time and with full detail lighting.

In the automotive industry where it may cost a billion or more dollars to bring out a new car design, the designers need to have all of their designs perfected as far as possible so that expensive retooling is unnecessary. This means that they must be able to “see” the car completely – in all details and with the correct lighting, including raytracing.

Before Quadro K6000, an entire car could not be visualized completely at once in real time. Compromises had to be made and some details needed to be left out. Now that is unnecessary and the designers will be able to work more accurately and far more quickly.

The oil and gas industry as well as weather modeling deals constantly with huge data sets – often hundreds of gigabytes of information that must be computed. Until now, they have had to break their data sets up into smaller sections to even make it workable.

Conclusion

Just as for gamers, faster is always better and the lucky companies that have been able to work with the Quadro K6000 engineering samples are reporting much faster results and are able to work with much larger data sets than ever before. This translates into higher productivity and more profits.

Although the Quadro K6000 does not directly impact gamers playing PC games, it is always interesting to see the progress of related GPUs. Just as the Tesla K20X GPU preceded the GeForce Titan by months, sharing the same 14 SMX-enabled GPU, the new Quadro K6000 may portend a similar 15 SMX-enabled GeForce gaming GPU. It would be very interesting to compare the gaming performance of a Quadro K6000 with a GeForce Titan, although Nvidia says the Titan would be faster.

The Quadro K6000 will be available beginning this fall from Dell, HP, Lenovo and other major workstation providers; from systems integrators, including BOXX Technologies and Supermicro; and from authorized distribution partners, including PNY Technologies in North America and Europe, ELSA and Ryoyo in Japan, and Leadtek in Asia Pacific.

The new Quadro mobile workstation graphics product line will also be available beginning this fall from major mobile workstation OEMs. Nvidia does not comment on future possible GeForce releases. Stay tuned to ABT forum for the latest discussion and news.

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