Nvidia has been pushing the boundaries of GPU technology beyond its limits, with a report last month revealing that the company's upcoming flagship Pascal GP100 GPU is capable of as much as 12 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance and up to four TFLOPs of double-precision compute performance.
The latest news regarding Nvidia involves the refresh of the Quadro M6000, which the company released last year as a professional-grade GPU.
The Quadro M6000 was released by Nvidia with 12 GB of VRAM within a 24 x 4 GB configuration. Nvidia has given the GPU a boost by doubling the VRAM to 24 GB, using higher density 8 GB GDDR5 memory chips.
In addition to the doubled VRAM, the new Quadro M6000 will also be adding new controls for its temperature and clock, which would improve the user's control over the GPU's performance and throttling for high-end configurations.
Not much else has changed about the refreshed Quadro M6000 though, as it still has Nvidia's Maxwell 2-based GM200 chip at its heart. Boost clock remains at 1,140 MHz, while memory clock is retained at 6.6 Gbps GDDR5. The price is also unchanged at a whopping $5,000.
The massive increase in memory for the Quadro M6000 is expected, as the theoretical maximum for the GM200 processor is 24 GB. With the expansion from 12 GB of VRAM to 24 GB, the new Quadro M6000 will be able to support the GM200's capacities.
The target for the Quadro M6000 is not gamers though, especially with that price tag, as it will be catering to companies that create high-quality CGI. These companies need as much VRAM as they are able to acquire, and with the update, Nvidia now holds the distinction as having the professional graphics card with the highest capacity. The previous holder of the title was AMD's FirePro W9100, which has 16 GB of VRAM, though the company has the capability to push that amount to as high as 32 GB in the future.
Other purposes that would be able to take advantage of the power provided by the new Quadro M6000 include facial recognition software, weather prediction services and Bitcoin mining.
