Nvidia Quadro and Tesla Strategy

Fabless GPU and ARM processor designer, American company Nvidia is changing its strategy regarding its professional computing solutions. We’ve reported here about Nvidia’s plans with the Quadro K5000, but now we’ve stumbled upon some new info that describes a likely scenario at the company.

There are certainly considerable more servers and workstations that could put a GPU compute card like the TESLA K10 to good use than there are graphics workstations in need of a Quadro K5000 video card. Nvidia practically knows that Tesla has considerably more potential than Quadro and is apparently shifting its focus and concentrating on making this the company’s main professional brand. Of course Quadro has more than a decade of history behind it and the market recognition is respectable, but Nvidia want to use this as a boost for Tesla sales and brand image. The company seems to believe that Quadro card needs to be a little more affordable, if you can call $2250 (1850 EUR) “affordable,” but Quadro customers should also buy Tesla accelerators.

The company is thus advertising its Maximus package that includes a Quadro card and a Tesla adapter. What’s interesting is that, while Quadro K5000 may seem “cheap” at $2250, the Maximus package will cost over $5500 (4500 EUR). Therefore Nvidia will actually be making much more profit. If the company manages to convince even only 25% of the traditional Quadro customers to buy the bundle, the profits will be huge while Tesla sales will increase tremendously. This way, Nvidia will manage to get Tesla card into non-server workstations while the general Tesla image is still being associated with servers and super computers. Nvidia hopes to really increase the Tesla sales towards professional graphics users and increase the brand recognition in the professional market.

The strategy only has upsides, in our opinion, as the profits and revenues are only going to increase. The sales of Tesla cards are going to multiply. The Tesla brand image will be improved and the addressable markets will be more diverse. The users can only enjoy the lower price of the Quadro K5000, but we have a feeling that the K5000 card will actually end up giving comparable performance results with the current Quadro 6000 generation of cards that cost $3500 (2850 EUR) a piece. The way things look right now, Tesla will have the top GPU and card configuration in Nvidia’s professional lineup while Quadro will be less complex and more “affordable.”

Nvidia K5000 Quadro Professional Adapter
Image credits to anandtech

Posted in: Hardware, News, Preview