The M6000 is a $5000 (around £4000 in the UK) top of the line Workstation Graphics Card engineered by NVIDIA.
Released in 2015; the card features a fully fledged second generation Maxwell GM200 Core with 3072 CUDA Cores, 384-bit Memory Interface & a 250W TDP. The card originally shipped with 12GB of GDDR5 - until yesterday. NVIDIA has just upped that to a whopping 24GB meaning this is the highest amount of Memory to ever ship on a single-core GPU.
A little more info on this monster - & it's all just big numbers really; 7.0 TFLOPS (Teraflop) of raw compute performance, 317GB/s Memory Bandwidth, up to 68 Billion Colours with 36-bit Colour support.
Here are the official specifications:
GPU Core: GM200
GPU Core Clock: 988 MHz
GPU Memory: 24GB GDDR5
GPU Memory Clock: 6.6 GHz
Memory Interface: 384-bit
Memory Bandwidth: Up to 317GB/s
NVIDIA CUDA® Cores: 3072
SMM/Compute Units: 24
ROPs/TMUs: 96/192
Peak Single Precision Performance: Tp to 7 TFLOPs
System Interface: PCI Express 3.0 x16
Max Power Consumption: 250 W
Thermal Solution: Ultra-Quiet Active Fansink
Form Factor: 4.4” H × 10.5” L, Dual Slot, Full Height
Display Connectors: 4x DP 1.2, DVI-I DL, Optional Stereo
Max Simultaneous Displays: 4 direct, 4 DP 1.2 Multi- Stream
Max DP 1.2 Resolution: 4096×2160at60Hz
Max DVI-I DL Resolution: 2560×1600at60HzMax
DVI-I SL Resolution: 1920×1200at60Hz
Max VGA Resolution: 2048×1536at85Hz
Graphics APIs: Shader Model 5.0, OpenGL 4.53 , DirectX 12.04, Vulkan 1.03
Compute APIs: CUDA, DirectCompute, OpenCLTM
GPU Core Clock: 988 MHz
GPU Memory: 24GB GDDR5
GPU Memory Clock: 6.6 GHz
Memory Interface: 384-bit
Memory Bandwidth: Up to 317GB/s
NVIDIA CUDA® Cores: 3072
SMM/Compute Units: 24
ROPs/TMUs: 96/192
Peak Single Precision Performance: Tp to 7 TFLOPs
System Interface: PCI Express 3.0 x16
Max Power Consumption: 250 W
Thermal Solution: Ultra-Quiet Active Fansink
Form Factor: 4.4” H × 10.5” L, Dual Slot, Full Height
Display Connectors: 4x DP 1.2, DVI-I DL, Optional Stereo
Max Simultaneous Displays: 4 direct, 4 DP 1.2 Multi- Stream
Max DP 1.2 Resolution: 4096×2160at60Hz
Max DVI-I DL Resolution: 2560×1600at60HzMax
DVI-I SL Resolution: 1920×1200at60Hz
Max VGA Resolution: 2048×1536at85Hz
Graphics APIs: Shader Model 5.0, OpenGL 4.53 , DirectX 12.04, Vulkan 1.03
Compute APIs: CUDA, DirectCompute, OpenCLTM
Here is what NVIDIA say on the M6000:
The world’s most powerful workstation graphics card, giving you the extreme performance and on-board memory to take on your biggest visualisation challenges. Includes 24 GB of GPU memory and advanced capabilities for up to four 4K displays.
Strictly a professional card; the M6000 is by design intended for professionals to push forward in the graphics field by enabling far more bandwidth and raw compute performance than the competition. NVIDIA recently mentioned in their blog the M6000 & referenced a quote from Sony Pictures Imageworks with regards to what this sort of card enables them to do..
“At Sony Pictures Imageworks, we regularly push the limits of our ability to display and interact with very complex scenes,” said Erik Strauss, executive director of software development at Sony Pictures Imageworks. “The Quadro M6000 24GB gives us a 10x performance boost with the throughput necessary to display these types of large scenes smoothly and interactively.”
NVIDIA go on to mention their 'Quadro Visual Computing Platform' technology; enabling GPU-accelerated rendering capabilities & software tools. Notable; VR is mentioned:
GPU-powered rendering enables artists to visualize creations with photorealistic image quality and predict their designs more accurately with NVIDIA Iray using physically based lights and materials.
VR-ready support for head-mounted displays, enabling developers to more efficiently build and users to experience virtual reality creations.
Quadro Sync, Mosaic and Warp/Blend technologies, for image synchronization and resolution scaling of a synchronized display surface with multiple projectors or displays.
VR-ready support for head-mounted displays, enabling developers to more efficiently build and users to experience virtual reality creations.
Quadro Sync, Mosaic and Warp/Blend technologies, for image synchronization and resolution scaling of a synchronized display surface with multiple projectors or displays.
Interestingly; the M6000 refresh has no cost increment - the 24GB version will be priced exactly the same as the 12GB version that came before it.
NVIDIA will likely demonstrate the card at the up-coming GTC event on April 4-7, at the San Jose Convention Center.
