Nvidia Announces Quadro M6000 Card and Quadro VCA 2015 Render Server

Shortly after the announcement of the GeForce GTX Titan X, Nvidia announced the Quadro M6000 graphics card aimed at the professional market. This one is also equipped with the GM200 GPU and 12GB vram. In addition, Nvidia comes with the Quadro VCA 2015 render server.

The GM200 GPU, based on the Maxwell 2 architecture, offers 3072 Cuda cores and a maximum boost speed of 1.14GHz, good for a speed of 7 teraflops in single precision operations. It is the first time that Nvidia applies its Boost technology to a GPU in the Quadro line.

The GM200 GPU has six GPCs with four SMMs each. The GPU communicates with the memory via a 384bit-wide bus and the bandwidth is 317GB/s. Nvidia has equipped the Quadro M6000 with 12GB DDR5 RAM. According to Nvidia, the Quadro M6000 burns a maximum of 250W.

According to Nvidia, the Quadro M6000 can drive four displays in 4k resolution. Four displayport 1.2 connections are available for this, as well as a DVI-i connection. The card also contains an Nvenc encoder chip. It could potentially encode real-time video images with the HEVC codec. Nvidia does not mention recommended prices for the professional video card, but previous models had prices of more than 5000 euros. It is therefore to be expected that the Quadro M6000 will be found in this price segment.

In addition to releasing the Quadro M6000, Nvidia has also announced the Quadro VCA 2015. This visual computing appliance can put multiple video cards to work, mainly for rendering jobs. The new render server can hold eight Quadro cards, using a variant of the M6000. When placing eight cards, 24,576 Cuda cores become available, along with 96GB of vram. The Quadro VCA runs on CentOS 6.6. The rendering system has a suggested retail price of 50,000 dollars, almost 47,000 euros.