Tuesday, October 6th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Nvidia unveils new Quadro M professional mobile GPUs

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Nvidia has announced its new Quadro M series of GPUs for professional mobile graphics workstations. There are six new cards: the M5000M, M4000M, M3000M, M2000M, M1000M and M600M.

The company claims the range performs “up to 2x as fast” as the cards’ K-series predecessors.

New Maxwell architecture
Like their desktop equivalents, announced earlier this year, the new cards use Nvidia’s new Maxwell architecture rather than the old Kepler architecture.

Although it hasn’t posted any figures for DCC tools, Nvidia’s blog post includes a benchmark for Premiere Pro comparing the M5000M, M4000M and M3000M to their predecessors, the K5100M, K4100M and K3100M.

That doesn’t quite show a 2x speed boost, but at 1.5x to 1.75x, the performance increase is still pretty healthy.

The benchmark doesn’t show the three lower-end cards in the range, which AnandTech reports to be using an earlier generation of the Maxwell architecture, so we’d expect the gains to be lower there.

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Specs for the new M-series mobile GPUs (above) and the older K-series (below). Click to view full-size.

Otherwise, the specifications for the new cards look fairly similar to their predecessors.

Most of the new M-series GPUs offer the same quantity of on-board RAM as their K-series equivalents, with the exception of the M2000M, which moves up to 4GB, and the M600M, which moves up to 2GB.

Memory bandwidth is up, however: to 160GB/s for the three top-end cards, 80GB/s for the lower-end cards. And like the K5100M before it, the M5000M sports 8GB of on-board RAM – the most of any mobile GPU.

Availability
The new GPUs should become available this year in mobile workstations including Dell’s Precision 15 5000 series and 15 and 17 7000 series; HP’s ZBooks, Lenovo’s ThinkPad P50 and P70 and MSI’s WS60 and WT72.

Read Nvidia’s blog post announcing the new Quadro M mobile GPUs

See full specifications for the new cards on Nvidia’s website