Since the initial launch of NVIDIA’s unusual chip stack for Kepler in late March, there has been quite a bit of speculation on how NVIDIA would flesh out their compute and professional products lines. Typically NVIDIA would launch a high-end GPU first (e.g. GF100), and use that to build their high-end consumer, professional, and compute products. Kepler of course threw a wrench into that pattern when the mid-tier GK104 became the first Kepler GPU to be launched.
The first half of that speculation came to rest in May, when NVIDIA has announced their high-end Kepler GPU, GK110, and Tesla products based on both GK104 and GK110. NVIDIA’s solution to the unusual Kepler launch situation was to launch a specialized Tesla card based on GK104 in the summer, and then launch the more traditional GK110 based Tesla late in the year. This allowed NVIDIA to get Tesla K10 cards in the hands of some customers right away (primarily those with workloads suitable for GK104), rather than making all of their customers wait for Tesla K20 at the end of the year.
Meanwhile the second half of that speculation comes to an end today with the announcement of NVIDIA’s first Kepler-based Quadro card, the Quadro K5000.
