Nvidia announce Quadro K5000 Kepler workstation card

Nvidia has finally brought Kepler to the Quadro workstation graphics card line. Initially, Kepler has only been available on high end consumer cards (and some lower end ones like the GT 640) and its single precision floating point K10 Tesla GPGPU boards.

The K20 based Quadro K5000 card has impressive specifications. 1,536 cores with 2.1 teraFLOPS of single precision performance. Nvidia has also added 4GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus with total memory bandwidth of 173GB/s. At $2249 it doesn’t offer anywhere near as many TFLOPs as AMD at the same price point. However, you have to consider when it comes to the professional market there is more to the buying decision than just performance.

Nvidia’s new generation of Kepler Quadro GPUs offers even greater power efficiency and compute power as well as the Nvidia professional customer support and software packages that the industry has come to respect. Add in the fact businesses don’t like to switch “sides” because of the costs involved in retraining and upgrading systems, we think Nvidia’s Quadro series will still remain dominant even though AMD’s FirePro cards offer more compute power for a lower price.

Nvidia still has the support of big OEM partners including HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu – and we don’t expect that to change. Nvidia also took the time to tell us that the K20 Tesla workstation GPU would be delayed by around a month – available in December, the Quadro K5000 is available from October. The K20 Tesla GPU costs $3199 whilst the K5000 costs $2249 as mentioned earlier.

Source: Press Release