NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 SLI (Laptop) vs NVIDIA T550 Laptop GPU vs NVIDIA Quadro T2000 Max-Q

The Nvidia T550 Laptop GPU (formerly known as Quadro T550 Mobile) for laptops is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). It is based on the consumer GeForce MX550 and features the same 1024 cores and a 64 Bit memory bus. The card offers 4 GB GDDR6 with a maximum bandwidth of 112 GB/s and no dedicated display outputs (iGPU display outputs used via Optimus). The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. 

The professional GPUs offer certified drivers, which are optimized for stability and performance in professional applications (CAD, DCC, medical, prospection, and visualizing applications). The performance in these areas is therefore much better compared to corresponding consumer GPUs.

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal. In contrary to the faster Quadro RTX cards, the T550 does not feature raytracing and Tensor cores.

The Nvidia Quadro T2000 with Max-Q Design is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). It is based on the consumer desktop GTX 1650 Ti therefore currently between a mobile GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 Ti. The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. Compared to the normal Quadro T2000, the Max-Q variants are clocked lower and work in a more efficient state. Currently, we know of two variants with different clock speeds and power consumptions (35 and 40 W).

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

The performance in professional apps should be clearly lower than a normal (Max-P) Quadro T2000 due to the lower clock speeds, but still ahead the slower Quadro T1000 due to the higher shader count. Compared to consumer cards, the mobile GTX 1650 should be still slower.

Thanks to the relative low power consumption of the Quadro T2000 Max-Q, the GPU is suited for thin and light laptops. The used TU116 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.