Nvidia: New Quadro-GPUs for mobile workstations introduced

In the enterprise, progress is slower. Eventually, change happens here as well.

Fitting with that, PCs for companies have longer life-cycles than their consumer counterparts. The newest technologies are often adopted later. That is also true for GPUs: Nvidias newest GPU generation Pascal was introduced last year for Gaming laptops, last week at CES, another addition to the line was announced (GeForce GTX 1050).

What was missing until now: Low end chips and the workstation variants. The first group is still missing, which is why there are many newly introduced laptops with the GeForce 940MX. The second group was updated yesterday. But not all new Quadros are based on Pascal. Nvidia introduced seven new chips: Quadro P5000, P4000, P3000, M2200, M1200, M620 and M520. Which chips are based on Pascal is obvious when looking as the model number reflects on which generation the chips are based, all lower-end Quadro GPUs are still based on the old Maxwell generation. This generational difference becomes visible when looking at the DisplayPort as well: While the Pascal Quadro GPUs all have DP 1.4, the Maxwell chips are still stuck with DP 1.2.

This split in the lineup may have some rather unpleasant consequences for the new generation of mobile workstations: 15,6" workstations like the ZBook 15, Precision 7510 or ThinkPad P50 traditionally only feature Quadros up to the 2000-series. That would leave them with Maxwell GPUs for this year, while the bigger 17,1" models already move on to Pascal. This also leads to other "weird" situations: The new XPS 15 and the Precision 5520 both feature the same chassis. Yet, the XPS 15 features a much more powerful GeForce 1050, while the Precision M1200 only gets the Quadro M1200.

Quelle(n)