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Intel Licenses NVIDIA SLI Technology For P55 Chips
adeelarshad82 writes "NVIDIA announced that Intel has licensed the company's SLI technology for inclusion in upcoming products — as have a slew of major hardware partners such as ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI. This means the P55 chipsets that power those new socket LGA 1156 motherboards, which are based around the next-gen Nehalem architecture, will let you build systems using two or four NVIDIA-powered GPUs. Specifically, the licensing agreement covers the Core i5 and Core i7 microprocessors."
So does Intel hold enough share of the chipset market, for this to become an antitrust issue?
Unless nVidia will license that same technology to ATI, it sounds like it freezes ATI out of the multi-GPU-on-Intel-chipsets market.
First this and then this and now this
So this is how the Nvidia CEO intended to open a can of whoop ass on Intel. What a dumb-ass...
Is it Intel that paid NVidia or the other way around? Having support for SLI is defo good thing for NVidia and for Intel, the question is who should care more.
TFA says that the Intel chipsets will be limited to 8 lanes instead of 16 to give Nvidia an advantage for thier own chipsets.
Why is a license needed to interface with an IC in the first place?
This is just a weak form of DRM. Nvidia's drivers check the motherboaïrd against a whitelist and if the mobo is on the list the driver allows SLI. Naturally, chipset/motherboard makers have to pay protection money, er licensing fees, to get on the list.
nVidia does charge for SLI licenses. Reason being that they are also in the motherboard chipset market and want you to buy theirs. Intel wasn't all that pleased with the situation and so refused to license QPI to nVidia, which would mean no Core i7 chipsets. Well, that got all resolved and licensing started happening both ways. My guess is neither side is paying the other all that much.
SLI/crossfire is bullshit
the relentless flash pop-up ads on that site (that re-open immediately upon clicking close) made it impossible to read the article. Something tells me this isn't what the site had in mind when it sold advertising space there ...
My friend Debbie Ann is so promiscuous, instead of an appointment book she needs a package manager
... to get this to be a reality or I would expect to see Apple grabbing some of AMD/ATi harmony as the alternative.
Apple is pushing OpenCL and it's rather limited [CPU-core bound OpenCL only] if none of Apple's systems have SLI support.
Frankly, I've been less than pleased with the whole SLI vs CrossFire debacle. It's a friggin PCI-Express bus! This is nothing more than software and/or firmware enforced lock-in, and it stinks. I would have preferred for Intel to reject the SLI tax entirely. NVidia is the small player here, they're the ones who should be bending over backwards to get the big guys to promote their products. I don't want to pay an SLI tax on my motherboard, NVidia should be plenty glad that I'm buying two expensive GPUs instead of one, and they should consider a partnership with Intel like a divine blessing because Intel is 10 times larger and has far greater reach into every single market.
The situation is simple: right now, I own a perfectly fine motherboard that doesn't support SLI (Intel P35). I also have a perfectly fine Geforce 8800 and would have loved to add a second, but I can't because my board isn't on the SLI whitelist. My options are:
A. buy the second card, and replace my motherboard with an overpriced unstable NForce 750 board
B. fuck NVidia and buy two brand new AMD cards
Assuming equal performance, option B would cost me far less, even though I would prefer the NVidia GPU. Their SLI lock in has thus resulted in a lost sale.
Now I'm just one guy, but here's the funny part: I used to sell gaming rigs... lots and lots of 'em. When people heard about SLI, all the hardcore guys wanted it, but when they found out they had to taint their lovingly assembled systems with an NForce board, most of them backed off. It wasn't even about the money, it's about NVidia's awful track record in the chipset biz. They make even SIS look good. They never really fixed the NF2/3/4 disk corruption glitches, and they trashed the one good thing they had going for them: Soundstorm. That was a long time ago, but the way they handled those very public screwups left a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Apple doesn't support SLI, and if they wanted to they could "license" it directly from Nvidia.
If I remember correctly, long time ago there were some mainboards (with intel chipsets) and some old nvidia driver, to allow SLI. Then, with some driver update, SLI stopped working on those boards that were not licensed / did not use licensed chipsets.
The conclusion seems to be that the SLI support on the mainboard is nothing more than some firmware that can be detected by the driver to enable SLI? Shouldn't it be possible to "solve" this problem with a different (modified, possibly not perfectly legal) driver?
I have more general Intel questions I'm sure someone here knows.
I understand that this new socket (LGA 1156) will support both i5 and i7 CPU's... are the i5's the "new" mainstream cpu's, lower price + lower power(less cores?) vs i7's... is this correct?
also, will the LGA 1156 socket be "more upgrade-able" vs the LGA 1366 socket, the one that is currently used for the i7.
it seems like the i5 is a step down, so i would expect the 1156 to be less future-upgrade-friendly, but it's also a "newer" socket, so i'm not sure.
I think the government should put some legislation in place to enforce interoperability whenever technically feasible. If someone wants to use a new plug for something, first a) show that it is necessary and b) make sure that everyone can use it without having to pay royalties etc. In phase two, act out some similar regulations for the gaming console market.
+1 informative!
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