Nvidia wants to fill the gap between GM200 and GM206

Jun 29, 2015 08:14 GMT  ·  By

Dedicated to graphics technology and research, the Siggraph conference and exhibition in Los Angeles provides close-up views of the latest in digital art, emerging technologies in the graphics department.

Following the same time frame as last year's launch of the Quadro Kxx2, Nvidia chose to give the public a hint of its line-up and Siggraph by adding support for the latest Quadro SKUs, the Nvidia Quadro M5000 and Nvidia Quadro M4000 in the company's newest driver update. These graphics cards are dedicated to professional graphic designers, animators and CGI art developers.

However, a clue of a possible announcement came out on Laptopvideo2go forums. This is only a hint as much is quite unknown about the configuration of these GPUs. The Quadro parts are based on the GM204GL GPU while the Tesla M60 is also based on the GM204 GPU.

Yet, these are middle-end GPUs as the GM204 is only the little brother of the high-end GM200 flagship, the M5000 had the GM204 or the middle-end GPU and the M4000 variant had the low-end GM206 GPU. While the M6000 Quadro undoubtedly has the GM200, both the Quadro M5000 and M6000 are based on the GM204 GPU.

A cut-down GM200 GPU for professionals

It is assumed that both M5000 and M4000 will have around 2000 Cuda Cores boasting around four or eight gigabytes of VRAM GDDR5 both of them having a memory bus bandwidth of 256-bit. As advertised, they will be GM200’s little brothers as the first boasts impressive specs as 12GB GDDR5 VRAM, 3072 Cuda Cores and 988 MHz.

Apparently, Nvidia is slowly replacing Kepler parts in Quadro lineup with Maxwell. So far, only the GM206 has not been confirmed to be used with new Quadro M series. Probably being considered of low performance, it has been either skipped or sidetracked from the exhibition.

The Tesla K60, on the other hand, is expected to be a full-fledged GM204 GPU with 8GB of GDDR5 vRAM.

These are only the first hints we're getting of what the public should expect coming at Siggraph in August this year.

Newest Nvidia Driver hints from LaptopVideo2Go
Newest Nvidia Driver hints from LaptopVideo2Go

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

New Quadro GM204 might come at Siggraph 2015
Newest Nvidia Driver hints from LaptopVideo2Go
Open gallery