Nvidia’s GP100 graphics chip has shown up in two different forms for datacenters already: first as a Tesla P100 NVLink mezzanine card for HPC systems, and second as a Tesla P100 PCIe accelerator. The green team has now finished its GP100 hat trick with the Quadro GP100, a graphics card that brings the most potent Pascal chip to workstations for the first time.
It’s not this small in real life, we promise
According to Anandtech , the GP100 GPU in this Quadro arrives on the desktop with every bit of its frightening floating-point performance intact. That means FP64 calculations will tick along at 5.3 TFLOPS, FP32 at 10.6 TFLOPS, and FP16 at 20.7 TFLOPS. The card’s GP100 GPU shares its interposer with 16GB of HBM2 RAM. Unlike its Tesla counterparts, the Quadro offers four DisplayPort 1.4 outs, one DVI-D out, and optional provisions for stereo goggles.
The Quadro GP100 will also mark the first appearance of Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect in a traditional PC-compatible form factor. Using appropriate bridges, workstation users will be able to team a pair of Quadro GP100s for more performance and a 32GB pool of RAM.
The GP100’s (note: I hate GPUs and graphics cards having the same name) next-closest sibling in the Quadro lineup is the GP102-powered P6000 , but the new hotness doesn’t necessarily supersede the older here. The P6000 offers higher single-precision performance at 12 TFLOPs, and it also offers more RAM in the form of 24GB of GDDR5X.
Anandtech notes that the GP102 card can’t come anywhere near the GP100’s FP64 throughput, however, and it also won’t offer the double-rate FP16 performance from packed instructions nor the ECC RAM support that’ll likely be critical to demanding professionals. Consequently, the choice of monster Quadro for a given job will be more nuanced than just hammering «buy» on the most expensive option in Dell’s or HP’s workstation configurators. CAD professionals will be able to get their hands on the Quadro GP100 starting in March.<\/p>\n