NVIDIA GTC 2010 Wrapup
 

NVIDIA is launching Quadro parts based on the GF106 and GF108 GPUs. This contrasts from their earlier Fermi Quadro parts, which used GF100 GPUs (even heavily cut-down ones) in order to take advantage of GF100’s unique compute capabilities: ECC and half-speed double precision (FP64) performance. As such the Quadro 2000 and 600 are more focused on NVIDIA’s traditional professional graphics markets, while the Quadro 4000, 5000, and 6000 cover a mix of GPU compute users and professional graphics users who need especially high performance.


NVIDIA likes to crow about their professional market share, and for good reason – their share of the market is much more one-sided than consumer graphics, and the profit margins per GPU are much higher. It’s good to be the king of a professional market. It also helps their image that almost every product being displayed is running a Quadro card, but then that’s an NV conference for you.

Along those lines, it’s the Quadro group that gets to claim much of the credit for the big customers NVIDIA has landed. Adobe is well known, as their Premiere Pro CS5 package offers a CUDA backend. However a new member of this stable is Industrial Light & Magic, who just recently moved to CUDA to do all of their particle effects using a new tool they created, called Plume. This is one of the first users that NVIDIA mentioned to us, and for good reason: this is a market they’re specifically trying to break in to. Fermi after all was designed to be a ray tracing powerhouse along with being a GPU compute powerhouse, and while NVIDIA hasn’t made as much progress here (the gold standard without a doubt being who can land Pixar), this is the next step in getting there.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3972/n...tc-2010-wrapup