Kicking off on this Sunday afternoon is CAD & CAE software developer Dassault Systèmes’ annual trade show, the aptly named SOLIDWORKS World. One of the major yearly gatherings for workstation hardware and software vendors, it’s often used as a backdrop for announcing new products. And this year NVIDIA is doing just that with a literal Big Pascal product launch for workstations.
The last time we checked in on NVIDIA’s Quadro workstation video card group, they had just launched the Quadro P6000. Based on a fully enabled version of NVIDIA’s GP102 GPU, the P6000 was the first high-end Quadro card to be released based on the Pascal generation. This is a notable distinction, as NVIDIA’s GPU production strategy has changed since the days of Kepler and Maxwell. No longer does NVIDIA’s biggest GPU pull triple-duty across consumer, workstations, and servers. Instead the server (and broader compute market) is large enough to justify going all-in on a compute-centric GPU. This resulted in Big Pascal coming to life as the unique GP100, while NVIDIA’s graphical workhorse was the smaller and more conventional (but still very powerful) GP102.
Because of this split in NVIDIA GPU designs, it wasn’t clear where this new compute-centric GPU would fit in across NVIDIA’s product lines. It’s the backbone of Tesla server cards, of course, and meanwhile it’s very unlikely to show up in consumer GeForce products. But what about the Quadro market, which in previous generations has catered to both graphics and compute users at the high-end (if only because of the mixed-use nature of previous generation GPUs)? The answer, as it turns out, is that Big Pascal has a place in the Quadro family after all. And that’s an interesting place at the top that NVIDIA calls the Quadro GP100.
Based on NVIDIA’s GP100 GPU, Quadro GP100 defies a simple explanation due in large part to GP100’s unique place in NVIDIA’s Pascal GPU family. Quadro GP100 on one hand a return to form for NVIDIA’s Quadro lineup. It’s the jack of all trades card that does everything – graphics and compute – including features that the Tesla cards don’t offer, a job previously fulfilled by cards like the Quadro K6000. On the other hand, it’s not necessarily NVIDIA’s most powerful workstation card: on paper its FP32/graphics performance is lower than Quadro P6000’s. So where does Quadro GP100 fit in to the big picture?
The long and short of it is that the Quadro GP100 is meant to be a Tesla/GP100 card for workstations, but with even more functionality. While NVIDIA offers PCIe Tesla P100 cards , those cards only feature passive cooling and are designed for servers; the lack of active cooling means you can’t put them in (conventional) workstations.
