Back in July NVIDIA launched Fermi in to the professional space, introducing the first of their Fermi-based Quadro cards. The Quadro 4000, 5000, and 6000 were all based on GF100, and like the GeForce and Tesla lines used cut down GPUs in order to meet NVIDIA’s TDP and yield needs.
Notably, all the Quadros launched with their FP64 capabilities uncapped, something we weren’t sure would be made available outside of the Tesla line. Along those same lines, the 5000 and 6000 models also had ECC support enabled, again another feature initially promoted for Tesla. The result of this was that the first Fermi Quadro cards were capable of behaving a great deal like Tesla cards on top of their traditional professional graphics duties.
Now less than 3 months down the line NVIDIA is launching the rest of the Quadro series. Today marks the launch of the 2000 and the 600, which extend the Fermi Quadro lineup to the smaller Fermi GPUs. In the process, these cards also move away from Tesla-like compute capabilities and focuses more on Quadro’s traditional graphics roles such as modeling, CAD, digital video production, and the more recently emerging field of GPU-accelerated professional applications.