Nvidia Quadro Mobile GPUs Feature Kepler Architecture

Processor manufacturer Nvidia unveiled a line of Quadro Mobile graphical processing units (GPUs) for high-performance notebooks and aimed at engineers, industrial designers, animators, and film and video editors who required a high degree of mobility. PC makers like Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Lenovo and Fujitsu are lining up to embrace the GPUs. Will smaller system builders and channel partners do the same? Here are some clues.

The mobile lineup, which includes the Quadro K5000M, Quadro K4000M, Quadro K3000M, Quadro K2000M, Quadro K1000M, and Quadro K500M, feature Kepler, the company’s fastest and most efficient GPU architecture and at least double the number of CUDA cores of previous generations.

Notebook manufacturers like HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Fujitsu have already integrated these new Quadro mobile GPUs into their products, including HP EliteBook Mobile Workstations, the Dell Precision M6700, M6700 Covet and M4700, Lenovo W530 ThinkPad and Fujitsu CELSIUS H920 and H720.

Hardware 3D window clipping enables hardware-accelerated clip regions for faster data transfer between a window and the frame buffer to improve overall graphics performance, while the Scalable Geometry Engine improves geometry performance across a range of CAD, DCC, and medical applications.

Other features include large GPU memory (up to 4GB) with fast bandwidth for display of complex models and scenes, as well as computation of large data sets, s fast transfer and manipulation of 3D textures and Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) for forward and backward compatibility with software drivers.

Rounding out the package is Nvidia’s Parallel DataCache technology, which supports a cache hierarchy combined with on-chip shared memory.

For channel partners, the new GPUs could appeal to customers in key vertical markets. An example: As workflows get more complex, designers and creative professionals need to maximize their productivity by utilizing all the available desktop space – leading Nvidia to offer Quadro mobile GPUs support for multi-monitor workspace with higher resolutions and multi-stream support.