While gaming enthusiasts can already get their hands on Nvidia's latest high-end hardware, those who spend countless hours in front of workstations running simulations and deep learning tasks (among other things) have been waiting for an upgrade. Well, here it is: the green giant from Santa Clara has announced half a dozen graphics cards under the Quadro family, all based on its Pascal architecture, and at the head is the Quadro GP100, with 16GB of HBM2 memory, and plenty of ambition.
Depending on the manufacturer, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 costs between 700 and 800 euros. These are hard numbers to swallow, but they are worth it in the long run. For less than half of that, you can get the GeForce GTX 1060, which by all accounts is a formidable card, and if the budget is even tighter, AMD has some excellent models. What I mean is that gamers enjoy a certain abundance when it comes to hardware, but there is a pending subject for Nvidia, and that is its Quadro family. Most of its recent models use Maxwell and Kepler chips, which, while they deserve all our respect, are starting to make a bit of noise compared to the potential of Pascal.
A New Generation for Workstations
Nvidia took advantage of the SOLIDWORKS World convention organized by Dassault (and which, by the way, ends tomorrow) to present its new Quadro cards: P400, P600, P1000, P2000, P4000, and the one that brings us here today, the GP100. At first, one might hesitate to call it a flagship card because Nvidia launched its Quadro P5000 and P6000 last October, also with Pascal technology and terrifying specs. In fact, if we analyze its performance in floating-point operations (32-bit), the P6000 sits one step above the Quadro GP100, but that doesn't mean the new card comes empty-handed. First, it has 16GB of HBM2 memory, which translates into a 4096-bit bus (the P6000 has 384). Second, Nvidia added NVLink support, allowing two GP100 cards to connect simultaneously.
More than competing with the P series of Quadro cards, the main role of the GP100 seems to be that of an equivalent to the Tesla P100 accelerators, aimed at individual workstations (while the P100 was designed for servers). Needless to say, the GP100 comes with a full package of ports (one DVI and four DP 1.4) and virtual reality support.
Price? Doubts will be cleared in March, but rumors already place it in the five-thousand-dollar territory.
