DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Nvidia Maximus consists of a Quadro graphics card and a Tesla GPU compute board, tied together by a unified driver in a certified Nvidia Maximus workstation.

Ecce Maximus (behold Maximus), we proclaim, giving our best impression of having had a classical education.

We’re not talking about the resurrection of Russell Crowe in Gladiator here though, Maximus is a new (Graphics Processing Unit) GPU technology from Nvidia that the Santa Clara firm reckons will revolutionise engineering and visualisation workflows on workstations.

The concept is simple. Deploy two GPUs in a workstation instead of one. GPU ‘A’ is a Nvidia Quadro graphics card used exclusively for 3D graphics, while GPU ‘B’ is a specialist Nvidia Tesla GPU compute card reserved for complex rendering or simulation calculations. According to Nvidia, this solves a common problem in GPU compute workflows where software competes for GPU and CPU resources and one operation often wins out at the expense of the other. In such circumstances, the workstation can only work efficiently when performing linear workflows - design or simulate, or design or render, but never both operations at the same time.

Read more…