Nvidia launches five Quadro cards, relaunches two

Santa Clara (CA) – Nvidia is taking advantage of Intel’s Nehalem buzz today and reminded us that the company has the “most powerful professional graphics card lineup”. There are seven new cards, if we forget that two of them were launched last year and are now apparently relaunched – including a 4 GB monster.

Workstation graphics cards carry tons of margin and with the renaissance of the workstation, we can expect these products to become much more visible again down the road. Intel has its Nehalem-EP (Xeon 5500) out of the gate, so it makes just sense that Nvidia is using the attention of the press and customers for some news.

There are five new cards in the firms product lineup, which now stretches from a 256 MB of memory and eight enabled processing cores for $99 all the way to the Quadro FX 5800 with 4 GB of memory and 240 processors for $3300. The new cards include the models FX 3800, FX 1800, FX 580, FX 380 and NVS 295. The 4800 and 5800, which Nvidia also describes as new were launched in Q4 of last year.

Also new is a new SLI Multi-OS technology that allows users to support multiple Quadro GPUs in a single workstation and a virtualized environment for the first time.  The feature is available with the

FX 3800, FX 4800 and FX 5800. . SLI Multi-OS works in with Parallels Workstation Extreme virtualization software and Intel’s VT-d technology, assigning both the host and guest virtual machine its own dedicated GPU.