Why NVIDIA decided to retire its Quadro brand

NVIDIA's decision to retire its Tesla brand was somewhat understandable, but this month's abandonment of Quadro was more puzzling. In a new article, AnandTech goes in-depth on why NVIDIA decided to dump one of its oldest brand. The reason seems to be that there's an increasing overlap between NVIDIA's professional visualization (ProViz) and compute products.

The former Quadro and Tesla parts offers similar functionality, so by merging everything under a single NVIDIA brand the company will be able to communicate more clearly with its professional customers. One key element at play here is that the pro visualization and the compute markets have quickly become one and the same. The move will also allow NVIDIA to reduce the number of SKUs offered. You can read it over here.

One of the consequences of which has been that NVIDIA’s own messaging on what cards can do what tasks has become unfocused, never mind potentially confusing customers. If you need an actively-cooled desktop card for running neural network prototyping, for example, what card do you buy? Previously it was the Quadro card, despite the fact that it was a ProViz part. Similarly, the ex-Tesla V100 makes a great part for provisioning a virtual Quadro instance, even though it’s not a Quadro part. As a result, NVIDIA has opted to go the route of essentially merging their compute and ProViz hardware lineups in an effort to simplify their offerings.