Quadro on Configurations

Who's making Quadro boards?

Ever since S3's acquisition of Diamond Multimedia, Nvidia has been the only 3D chip manufacturer not looking to market self-branded retail/OEM products. This means that they sell the chips to manufacturers who integrate them into their own products. Elsa is the first and currently only manufacturer to announce a product based on Quadro. Elsa's Quadro board will be marketed in their well-established GLoria line of professional accelerators.

The Elsa GLoria II will initially be available in 32 and 64MB versions. Currently, we don't have any information on whether these will be SDR or DDR versions, but we do know that the 64MB version is expected to retail at $799. A bit steep? Not for this market. Nvidia prices the Quadro chip itself between $100 and $150 in lots of 10,000.

In general, the 64MB and greater versions are slated for high level system OEMs and retail shelves, whereas the 32MB Quadro boards will find their way into mid-level OEM and BTO systems.

Again, the board-level specifics are up to Elsa (and whatever other vendors decide to use the processor). So why does a 64MB card cost more than twice what a 32MB DDR GeForce? Well, there are a few reasons. For one, Quadro chips aren't going to be produced in quite as much quantity as GeForce 256. After all, consumer 3D IS where all the action is. However, the market in the consumer realm is so competitive that lower margins and miniscule product development styles are forcing companies like Nvidia to look to other venues.

Who's got the money?

The workstation market is a perfect example. With big name players such as Sun, Hewlett Packaged, and Silicon Graphics, the enormous amounts of money spent in development and research have to be passed onto the end user. What this means is huge profit margins, especially for manufacturers such as Intel, who bring a simple x86 scheme (Xeon) into the market, claiming unsurpassed price/performance. While the systems can't keep up with the big boys pound for pound, Intel is still able to change close-to-workstation prices and sell on the convenience and low price.

The tiny Elsa GLoria II

Nvidia, realizing that the onboard transform and lighting engine of the NV10 would be a valuable asset to the modeling/animation industry (after all, the particular move to hardware-accelerated geometry processing is wholly derivative from that market), Nvidia took the time to develop a workstation class version, knowing that the unified single-chip solution would offer additional cost benefits to a market occupied by multiple-chipset solutions (which require separate silicon for rasterization, geometry, RAMDAC, and sometimes memory controller).