NVIDIA Ushers In Its Maxwell-based Mobile Quadro Generation

With the last mobile Quadro release having taken place over two-years-ago, to say we’re overdue for an update would be an understatement. Fortunately, that update has just landed, and for those who’ve been holding off on an upgrade for this series, that wait has paid off. Similar to the improvements Maxwell brought to NVIDIA’s consumer GeForce series, the same is done to mobile Quadro: 2x the performance, and 2x the power-efficiency.

For this launch, NVIDIA has rolled-out six different models, with the Quadro M5000M (pictured below) ruling the roost. As the M6000 is NVIDIA’s top-end desktop chip, I’d wager that the company has plans for an M6000M down-the-road.

The top-end Quadro M5000M comes closest to the M4000 on the desktop side. Both chips enjoy a 8GB framebuffer, but the mobile chip shaves off 128 cores, as well as 32GB/s worth of memory bandwidth. The top three models come equipped with a memory bandwidth clocked at 160GB/s, while the lower three halve that. It’s worth noting that the M5000M is the only one of these mobile chips to pack an 8GB framebuffer; the three models that follow stick to 4GB.

Aside from the general performance gains Maxwell brings to the table (examples can be seen in our M6000 review), a major perk of the latest Quadros is enhanced Iray performance, which is something else we tackled a few months ago.

NVIDIA notes that Dell’s Precision 15 5000 and 17 7000 workstation notebooks will soon feature these new Quadros, as well as HP’s ZBook and Lenovo’s ThinkPad P50 and P70. Those who are heading to Adobe Max next week will be able to get a sneak peek at some of these models.

Because of Maxwell’s advanced architecture, and the fact that NVIDIA just managed to scale its GeForce GTX 980 down to fit inside of a notebook, I am holding out hope that NVIDIA might do the same thing for workstations. A whittling down of an M5000 to fit in a notebook would be downright amazing for the mobile content creator. Of course, that assumes that someone would be up for lugging around a 10lbs+ behemoth! Sometimes, though, the performance is just worth it.