14 DAY TRIAL // We'd love to say that NVIDIA has already launched a successor to the GeForce GTX 780, but that's not what the company did. Instead, the most powerful and most capable GPU ever built is the NVIDIA Quadro K6000. Quadro is the brand that NVIDIA uses to market its professional video boards, those suited for workstations, mobile and otherwise.
Thus, to cope with the advanced audio-visual design needs of companies like Nissan, Pixar and Apache Corporation, the Quadro line has always been superior to the consumer-centric GeForce collection.
Case in point, the NVIDIA Quadro K6000 GPU is actually a graphics card with the full-featured GK110 graphics processor (Kepler architecture).
It comes with 2,880 streaming multiprocessor (SMX) cores (faster visualization and compute horsepower) and 12 GB of GDDR5 ultra-fast memory.
Between that and four simultaneous display links (up to 4K resolution with DisplayPort 1.2), the adapter is five times as fast as the NVIDIA Quadro 6000 GPU (its predecessor) and has twice the graphics capability.
Add to that the ultra-low latency video I/O and support for large-scale visualization and you have a winning combination.
Pixar will use the “fastest and most capable GPU ever built” (NVIDIA's own words) for animation and visual effects in its famous films.
Meanwhile, Nissan will employ it for product styling and, since GPU acceleration can be employed in more than graphics tasks, Apace will conduct energy exploration calculations (will run jobs on Terraspark's InsightEarth application).
On a related note, NVIDIA has also completed a mobile GPU, called NVIDIA Quadro K5100M. This one, too, is the strongest in its field (mobile video processing).
Sales of the NVIDIA Quadro K6000 (and, we suppose, the Quadro K5100M as well) will start this fall through Dell, HP, Lenovo and other workstation makers. Some system integrators (like Supermicro) and distributors (PNY) will supply the product as well.