Nvidia's latest Quadro GPU delivers a blistering 12 teraflops of performance

The P6000 is aimed at the type of powerful workstations used for tasks like editing HD video and applying special effects, as well as the CAD/CAM applications used by engineers. Workstations generally have more powerful components and more memory capacity than regular desktop PCs.

The new GPU was announced Monday at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics trade show in Anaheim, California. Details about pricing and availability weren't immediately available.

The P6000 has 3,840 cores and 24GB of GDDR5X memory. It supports 432GBps (gigabytes per second) of memory bandwidth.

It has four DisplayPort 1.4 slots, supporting resolutions up to 4K at 120Hz and 5K at 60Hz. The GPU has internal pipelines to render faster 3D video.

The new Quadro is significantly faster than its predecessor, Nvidia said in a blog post, though it didn't provide side by side performance figures.

The current top-end Quadro is the M6000, which is based on the Maxwell architecture, and delivers peak single-precision performance of 7 teraflops. The M6000 uses GDDR5 memory and has lower memory bandwidth.

Nvidia also announced the Quadro P5000, which delivers 8.9 teraflops of peak performance. It has 2,560 cores, 16GB of GDDR5X memory and 288GBps of memory bandwidth. Pricing for that part wasn't immediately available, either.

There's still significant interest in high-powered workstations, in part for creating VR content for headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. 

For now, the Quadro P6000 is Nvidia's fastest GPU, though it's likely that an even faster chip for supercomputing will follow.

Nvidia's Quadro chips dominate the workstation market, though rival AMD is expected to announce new competing products later on Monday.