AMD FirePro M6100 vs NVIDIA Quadro K510M

AMD FirePro M6100

The AMD FirePro M6100 is an high-end graphics card for mobile workstations, which has been presented in mid-2013. Similar to the Nvidia Quadro series, the FirePro cards offer certified drivers for professional 3D-software like CAD. Due to optimizations and some unlocked features, the performance in these applications is much better compared to a consumer Radeon GPU.

Architecture

The FirePro M6100 integrates 14 Compute Units based on the GCN architecture. Therefore, the chip has 768 stream processors. The memory of up to 2 GB GDDR5 is connected via an 128-bit interface. Just like the Radeon series, the FirePro M6100 offers features like Eyefinity, Enduro or PCIe 3.0. Presumably, AMD uses a partially deactivated Bonaire graphics chip, but this has not yet been officially confirmed.

Performance

Thanks to the very high clock rate of up to 1100 MHz for the chip and 1500 MHz for the memory (6000 MHz effective, 96 GB/s), the 3D gaming performance is somewhat above the Nvidia Quadro K4100M or GeForce GTX 860M. Recent Games of 2014/2015 can thus be played fluently in medium to high details and full HD resolution.

Power Consumption

The FirePro M6100 features different energy saving techniques to reduce power consumption and prolong battery life. These include PowerPlay and PowerTune (for clocking the GPU), Zero Core (deactivates parts of the GPU when the display is off) and Enduro (dynamic GPU switching between the processor graphics and the dedicated Radeon GPU). However, the Fire Pro M6100 should still have a relatively high TDP (probably about 75 watts) and is only suited for large and well-cooled workstation notebooks from 15 to 17 inches.

NVIDIA Quadro K510M

The NVIDIA Quadro K510M is a DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.3 compatible graphics card for affordable mobile workstations. It is a Kepler-based GPU built on the GK107 chip with 192 out of 384 shader cores activated and is manufactured in 28nm at TSMC. The Quadro K510M is built for the Intel Shark Bay generation (Haswell) and is a successor to the Quadro K500M (Chief River platform). As a new feature, PCIe 3.0 is supported for the first time. The K510M usually comes with 1 GB GDDR5 VRAM clocked at 600 MHz (2400 MHz effective, 19.2 GB/s). 

The Quadro series offers certified drivers that are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications like CAD or DCC. OpenGL performance, for example, should be significantly better than with GeForce graphics cards of similar specifications.

Architecture

The Kepler architecture is the successor to the Fermi architecture that first appeared in laptops with the GeForce 400M series. The GK107 Kepler core offers two shader blocks, called SMX, that are clocked at the same speed as the central core. In the K510M, only one block is active leading to the 192 CUDA cores. Although more shader cores are available in the Kepler architecture as compared to the Fermi design, the Kepler shaders are still expected to be up to twice as power efficient. However, due to the missing hot clock of the shader domain, two shaders of a Kepler chip offer similar performance to just one shader of a Fermi chip (as the latter is clocked twice as fast).

Performance

The performance should be clearly above the old Quadro K500M, but somewhat below the higher clocked Quadro K610M. This would place the K510M between the consumer GPUs GeForce 710M and GT 720M. However, the exact core clock has not yet been confirmed. Nevertheless, most demanding games of 2013 will run fluently only in low detail settings.

Features

The improved feature set now includes support for up to 4 active displays. Furthermore, high resolution monitors of up to 3840 x 2160 pixels can now be connected using DisplayPort 1.2 or HDMI 1.4a if available. HD-Audio codecs, such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD, can be transmitted via bitstream mode through the HDMI port. However, as most laptops will feature Optimus, the integrated GPU will likely have direct control over the display ports and may limit the feature set available by the Nvidia Kepler cards. Please note: The K510M does not supprt 3D Vision Pro.

Using CUDA or OpenCL 1.2, the cores of the Quadro K510M can be used for general calculations.

The 5th generation PureVideo HD video processor (VP5) is also integrated in the GK107 core and offers hardware decoding of HD videos. Common codecs such as MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4 ASP, H.264 and VC1/WMV9 are fully supported up to 4K resolutions while VC1 and MPEG-4 are supported up to 1080p. Two streams can be decoded in parallel for features such as Picture-in-Picture. Another novelty is the inclusion of a dedicated video encoding engine similar to Intel QuickSync that can be accessed by the NVENC API.

The power consumption of the Quadro K510M is rated at a TGP of 30 W including the board and memory components. Therefore, the card is suited for medium-sized notebooks with 15-inch displays or greater.