NVIDIA's nForce Professional and Tyan's Words

CoffeeJunked writes "There's a lot of buzz about dual-core CPUs and with the release of the nForce Professional chipset from nVidia, there's a lot of buzz about the future of SMP machines as we know them. LinuxHardware.org has just published a couple of articles that get to the heart of the new chipset and what board manufacturers will be doing with them. The first article covers the chipsets and boards, while the second article is an interview with Tyan about what to expect from them this year. It's a good read all around."

Comments

Free Drivers

[gustgr]

Finally, NVIDIA's SLI has been a hot topic here because, as of yet, we haven't seen Linux drivers that support this hot new feature. When we talked to NVIDIA about this we were finally given a time-line which stated that it may be a couple of months still.

If the drivers were free software someone skilled enough would hack the missing features. Isn't about time to nVidia change its mind and release the sources?

Re:Free Drivers

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

If the drivers were free software someone skilled enough would hack the missing features. Isn't about time to nVidia change its mind and release the sources?

Tell that to David Kirk nvidia's chief scientist whose, "sense is that developers on those platforms are quite happy with our efforts" as a justification for not going open source. Plus some totally bizarro bullshit about "hackers tak[ing] bad advantage of raw hardware interfaces."

It is telling that he did not pull out the old, tried and true "competition sensitive" bullshit that so many hardware vendors have been hiding behind since day one.

Re:Talk about useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a bit concerned about the nforce4, from what i read already, there are 3 models, a "normal" nforce4, a "ultra" nforce4, and a "sli" nforce4. But altough you can't use SLI on the non-sli models, there are ways to enable SLI, on at least the ultra model ( http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2322/ ).
To quote the article, "Just as quickly, we learned that nVidia was not happy with this "SLI hack" and they changed their drivers quickly so that "semi-SLI would not work with current and later Forceware drivers." It appears that the later Forceware drivers check the chipset ID and if the driver sees "Ultra", then SLI is not enabled. MSI decided to kill the "semi-SLI" board because it would be a nightmare supporting a board that would only run with older nVidia SLI drivers."

So, how will this be (un)supported by the opensource community? Is nvidia doing to chipsets what they did to graphic cards? Everyone remembers how they locked out rgb overlays and unified front+back buffers from the geforce4 cards, altough the chips had the funcionality built-in, the drivers would disable these features, and save them for the more expensive quadro cards (there were some quick fixes for this, for windows, mainly rivatuner and softquadro4).
Does this means that now they're going to lock-out funcionality available on the chipset to maximize profit? I can't imagine how (linux) kernel developers will support a chipset which relies on closed drivers to enable or disable a specific funcionality, and judging by nvidia's attitude in the graphic cards department (which has a point, up to a certain extent nevertheless), i can't imagine nvidia releasing the specs for opensource drivers for this chipset, therefore loosing the income from the sli model, which would become redundant.
Do we now have to taint the kernel with chipset drivers? If so, i'm out of it, this is certainly a chipset to avoid.

Re:Nvidia Taking a Stand

[MojoStan]

However, you forget that Nvidia hasn't actually integrated a GPU in their core logic since the nforce2 chipset... Perhaps Nvidia found that IGP sales hurt their discrete solutions?

Perhaps. But I think another possibility is that the nForce3 chipset was not meant for "budget/mainstream" users, but for "enthusiasts." As we all know, enthusiasts don't want integrated graphics that share memory with the system.

The nForce4 chipset, on the other hand, does look like it's aimed at budget/mainstream users as well as enthusiasts. But with PCI Express and TurboCache, NVIDIA might have a cheap solution that's better than integrated graphics.

PCI Express x16 has more bandwidth than AGP (4 GB/s upstream and downstream) and allows writes directly from the GPU to system RAM. This allows a non-integrated graphics card to share memory with the system without the huge performance hit that AGP would have caused.

Instead of integrated graphics, maybe NVIDIA is planning to "bundle" their cheap TurboCache cards with nForce4 motherboards. That seems cool to me.