Nvidia’s new graphics card turns your PC into a ‘supercomputer’

Over at Solidworks in Los Angeles, Nvidia has revealed a crop of new Pascal-based Quadro graphics cards led by the GP100, which the company claims will effectively grant supercomputing capabilities to a desktop workstation PC.

The Quadro GP100 is certainly a very tasty piece of hardware aimed at the likes of deep learning, engineering and simulation workloads, as well as VR content creation. Based on the SPECviewperf 12 benchmark, it boasts no less than (up to) double the performance of the firm’s previous-generation solution.

It also comes with 16GB of HBM2 (high-bandwidth) memory and NVLink allows for a pair of the GPUs to be combined for 32GB of HBM2 on tap in a single PC.

To throw some more juicy numbers at you, the GP100 offers ‘unprecedented’ double precision performance, Nvidia notes, tipping up over 5TFlops which is nearly triple the speed of the Quadro K6000.

Nvidia says that single precision (FP32) performance is 10 TFlops, doubled to 20 TFlops when in half precision (FP16) mode.

Super six

The Quadro GP100 is joined by five other offerings, namely the P4000, P2000, P1000, P600 and P400, which boast different levels of power depending on what you need (although only the flagship GP100 has HBM2 video memory on board).

The company also said that its new Pascal-based Quadro cards are capable of rendering photorealistic images over 18 times faster than an Intel Xeon E5 2697 V3 (2.6GHz) processor with 14 cores (that’s 720p footage with Iray).

The launch of this host of cards follows the release of the Quadro P6000 and P5000 last summer.

These powerful new GPUs will be available from as soon as next month, although the exact pricing is still to be confirmed. Obviously enough, the beefy GP100 is likely to carry a very weighty price tag.

TOPICS

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

Latest in Pro
Someone looking at a marketing graph
Why ‘boring’ tech will be 2025's biggest marketing trend
Epos Expand Vision 5 Bundle main image
I tested the Epos Expand Vision 5 Bundle - read why this video conferencing solution is recommended
ransomware avast
Ransomware attacks are costing Government offices a month of downtime on average
Biamp MRB-M-X400-T main image
I tested the Biamp MRB-M-X400-T - read what this meeting room solution is actually like
Allied Telesis AT-AR4050S-5G main image
I tried out the Allied Telesis AT-AR4050S-5G - read how this gateway appliance holds up against the competition
Lock on Laptop Screen
Data breach at Pennsylvania education union potentially exposes 500,000 victims
Latest in News
Citroen 2CV
The retro EV resurgence is in full swing, as Citroen confirms the iconic 2CV will return with batteries
Hugging Snap
This AI app claims it can see what I'm looking at – which it mostly can
Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max REVIEW
The latest batch of leaked iPhone 17 dummy units appear to show where glass meets metal on the new designs
Hornet swings their weapon in mid air
Hollow Knight: Silksong could potentially launch this year and I reckon it could be a great game for an Xbox handheld
ransomware avast
Ransomware attacks are costing Government offices a month of downtime on average
Cassian looking at someone off-camera from a TIE fighter cockpit in Andor season 2
Star Wars: Andor creator is taking a stance against AI by canceling plans to release its scripts, and I completely get why