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SLI On Life Support For the AMD Platform
JoshMST writes "For years AMD and Nvidia were like peas and carrots, and their SNAP partnership proved to be quite successful for both companies. Things changed dramatically when AMD bought up ATI, and now it seems like Nvidia is pulling the plug on SLI support for the AMD platform. While the chipset division at AMD may be a bitter rival to Nvidia, the CPU guys there have had a long and prosperous relationship with the Green Machine. While declining chipset margins on the AMD side was attributed to AMD's lackluster processor offerings for the past several years, the Phenom II chips have reawakened interest in the platform and they have found a place in enthusiasts' hearts again. Unfortunately for Nvidia, they are seemingly missing out on a significant revenue stream by not offering new chipsets to go with these processors. They have also curtailed SLI adoption on the AMD platform as well, which couldn't be happening at a worse time."
Beginning of the end?
Why on earth if you're NVIDIA do you make it harder to find mainboards to leverage your tech? I'd have expected this move by AMD first, you'd think NVIDIA would be wanting to have their tech available everyplace possible.
The fact is that a very marginally small portion of people actually use more than one video card. And why should anyone really, when modern day consoles cost about the same amount as one would spend on a moderately high end processor + video card, why the hell would most people want to spend an extra 300 bucks or so to have an extra video card at only 25% or less extra benefit in framerate? Only the hardcore ones with the extra wallet is who. As for me, I'm more than happy with my $1000 system with ONE video card, and I know its going to last me at least and extra year or two anyway.
Anyway all I'm saying is AMD has the ability to tie in their own processor + GPU combo, plus let the consumer buy a separate GPU, thus getting their own "SLI". If they play their card right, they can just give the finger to NVIDIA and provide some real competition that this market really needs to prevent us all from paying $200-300 for a decent GPU these days.
ATI is right up there in performance when compared to it's rival Nvidia GPU's. The problem is, Intel's Core i7 blows anything AMD has out of the water. Even the aging Intel quad-cores rival with AMD's brand new Phenom 2's.
ATI isn't quite up there with nVidia for performance. The 4950 and 4750x2 of ATI struggle to compete with the GTX285 & GTX295 offerings of nVidia, but the ATI cards are cheaper. And while the Phenom II is behind the i7 in performance, it's also cheaper - especially when you factor in the cost of motherboard into the equation (i7 motherboards are almost exclusively expensive "enthusiast" setups).
So... You get what you pay for really.
Asus has jumped in bed with Microsoft as of late. With AMD's purchase of ATI and promise of open source drivers and Nvidia's failure to move forward in open source, Nvidia and Asus has seen the last dollar of mine.
I don't think this is entirely nVidia's doing. It is in AMD's best interest to push ATI cards and Crossfire since they own the company. This can be seen with the recent "Dragon" platform - pushing AMD Phenom CPU, AMD 790GX/FX chipset and ATI 4750/4950 graphics cards as a single solution.
ATI is right up there in performance when compared to it's rival Nvidia GPU's. The problem is, Intel's Core i7 blows anything AMD has out of the water. Even the aging Intel quad-cores rival with AMD's brand new Phenom 2's.
ATI isn't quite up there with nVidia for performance. The 4950 and 4750x2 of ATI struggle to compete with the GTX285 & GTX295 offerings of nVidia, but the ATI cards are cheaper. And while the Phenom II is behind the i7 in performance, it's also cheaper - especially when you factor in the cost of motherboard into the equation (i7 motherboards are almost exclusively expensive "enthusiast" setups).
So... You get what you pay for really.
Nvidia is pushing CUDA first, OpenCL second. AMD is moving Streams to second and OpenCL to first. I find AMD using their brains and Nvidia pissin' up a rope.
That's not really an accurate portrayal of what's going on. In reality it's more like, Intel is against the CPU side of AMD, in a semi-cordial relationship with the graphics side of AMD (ATI) and swatting at Nvidia like an annoying bug... which is all that Nvidia is compared to Intel despite Jen-Hsun Huang's deluded sense of grandeur.
Remember that Intel has supported ATI's crossfire configuration natively for a long time, and this support continues into the high-end X58 chipsets making Crossfire a very easy solution to implement. SLI on the other hand is either done through a dodgy "certification" of motherboard BIOS's by Nvidia, or by an actual bridge chip which has to be added to the motherboard simply to do SLI.
Larrabee will change many things, especially bringing Intel into competition for high end graphics. Frankly, I can't wait because it will mean that a fully documented architecture (vectorized x86) with pre-existing compiler support will finally be available. Linux stands to gain as the biggest beneficiary since getting graphics and general-purpose software running on Larrabee won't require the black-box drivers that NVidia and ATI supply, or the "documentation" that ATI dumps out that takes 2 years for open source developers to get even half working.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Unless you want to talk about spending $500 on a processor.
well, the GP does claim to be the sort of person who buys two GFX cards in order to get a marginally faster frame rate; it would be reasonable to assume he'd spend a ton on his cpu too to make his e-penis bigger
I think the answer is a lot simpler and more pedestrian. Nvidia seriously got the snot kicked out of them for the whole "bad solder" bit and the covering up they and the OEMs tried to do, and simply don't have the cash to keep up with both AMD/ATI and Intel.
Somebody higher up probably said "go with the most market share" but of course now that Intel isn't giving them a license to produce for the 1366 pretty much leaves Nvidia with no chipset market at all if they lose the suit against Intel. Meanwhile the AMD/ATI chips have become pretty decent and run nice and cool compared to what my friends said about the last couple of Nvidia chips which according to them were space heaters.
Personally I think if Larrabee turns out to be good Nvidia is gonna be in serious trouble. I know a lot of folks right now that won't touch an Nvidia GPU because of the whole bad solder fiasco, and the new chipsets from ATI do all the tasks that most everyday folks use their PCs for. So unless they buy out Via and it ends up a three way, with Intel/Larrabee, AMD/ATI, and Nvidia/Via, I could foresee a future where Nvidia slowly gets squeezed out of the market. Which is probably why they are trying to push Ion and Tegra, to get some much needed traction in the mobile spaces.
But I personally don't think it is some big conspiracy, I just think Nvidia was hurt a lot worse by the bad solder fiasco than they are letting on and are having to prioritize their resources. But switching to Intel without a license for LGA1366 in place was a seriously dumb move, and I wouldn't be surprised if they end up out of the chipset market altogether.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Own NVIDIA shares do you? Or just a fan boy?
Sorry, but the NVIDIA solder problems have been well documented, so you must have chosen to ignore this.
NVIDIA is going to use GDDR5 on their upcoming 40nm "midrange" parts. ATI actually did a lot of work on GDDR5 with the memory manufacturers, hence they got the technology early.
Quite simply with die sizes, the bigger the die, the more costly it is. AMD/ATI and NVIDIA both use TSMC for their products, so it comes down to die size. The bigger the die, the bigger the chance of a flaw affecting it, so yield drops, never mind getting fewer dies per wafer.
NVIDIA have to use a wider memory bus to compete on bandwidth using DDR3, that costs money, it requires a PCB with more layers, it increases complexity. There's a reason that AMD is selling decent graphics cards for $99 - $199, and NVIDIA have been forced to rebrand their old generation parts TWICE in the past year or two.
And ATI's drivers have been fairly good since they went with the monthly updates (it's not 2001 anymore), and even better since they've been part of AMD. There are issues still - hardware video transcoding is unusable, and thus the $30 NVIDIA hardware transcoder is a better option, for those who use it.
A key part of DirectX 11 is hardware tesselation, and ATI have had that since the 360's R600 chip. DirectX 10.1 includes some non-trivial performance enhancements. NVIDIA has been holding back the market by not being able to support 10.1. ATI have DX11 hardware already, they showed it off at Computex a couple of weeks ago.
NVIDIA aren't the same as the good old days when they had awesome chipsets like NForce2, the best graphics cards, etc. However they do push onwards with GPU computer (CUDA) and PhysX, but OpenCL will overtake the former, and the latter won't catch on unless it is cross-GPU.