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Nvidia and AMD Hug It Out, SLI Coming To AMD Mobos
MojoKid writes "In a rather surprising turn of events, NVIDIA has just gone on record that, starting with AMD's 990 series chipset, you'll be able to run multiple NVIDIA graphics cards in SLI on AMD-based motherboards, a feature previously only available on Intel or NVIDIA-based motherboards. Nvidia didn't go into many specifics about the license, such as how long it's good for, but did say the license covers 'upcoming motherboards featuring AMD's 990FX, 990X, and 970 chipsets.'"
Since all the exclusion did was hurt nVidia in sales for people who stay loyal to AMD and refuse to go intel just for SLi. Allowing SLi on AMD boards will boost nVidias sales a bit.
nVidia and AMD got along great before AMD bought ATi. nVidia really helped keep them floating back when AMD couldn't make a decent motherboard chipset to save their life. nForce was all the rage for AMD heads.
Well it is in the best interests of both companies to play nice, particularly if Bulldozer ends up being any good (either in terms of being high performance, or good performance for the money). In nVidia's case it would be shooting themselves in the foot to not support AMD boards if those start taking off with enthusiasts. In AMD's case their processor market has badly eroded and they don't need any barriers to wooing people back from Intel.
My hope is this also signals that Bulldozer is good. That nVidia had a look and said "Ya, this has the kind of performance that enthusiasts will want and we want to be on that platform."
While I'm an Intel fan myself I've no illusions that the reason they are as cheap as they are and try as hard as they do is because they've got to fight AMD. Well AMD has been badly floundering in the CPU arena. Their products are not near Intel's performance level and not really very good price/performance wise. Intel keeps forging ahead with better and better CPUs (the Sandy Bridge CPUs are just excellent) and AMD keeps rehashing, and it has shown in their sales figures.
I hope Bulldozer is a great product and revitalizes AMD, which means Intel has to try even harder to compete, and so on.
Hard to say(until bulldozer drops) whether NVIDIA thinks that they are really good, or good enough. Since NVIDIA no longer has an intel chipset business, tying SLI to Intel platforms no longer serves to move more product; but to restrict the size of their potential market(since anybody who wants the, often quite aggressive, price/performance of an AMD part won't be buying more than one NVIDIA card, at most).
So long as they are confident that AMD's CPUs will be good enough not to bottleneck SLI configurations, trying to sell multiple cards to people who purchase AMD CPUs seems only reasonable. If, of course, they think that the CPUs will be even better than good enough, the approach is even more reasonable, so it doesn't tell us too much about which it is.
And what exactly was that snork for? The "bang for the buck" has been firmly in the AMD side of the aisle for quite some time, as you can see here on this handy chart. Thanks to the Intel socket roulette it has gotten to the point that depending on the socket one can build an AMD quad complete for less than a dual Intel and motherboard alone, that is how much extra you are paying for all those ads (and the kickbacks to OEMs of course).
Since it came out that Intel was rigging their compiler and bribing OEMs (where the hell is the antitrust bust anyway?) I've been selling AMD exclusively and my customers couldn't be happier. The lower price of AM3 boards and CPUs means they can get better features and more options for less money and having those extra cores helps to future proof a system. I mean how can you complain when you can get an AMD triple OEM PLUS a good ASRock motherboard for under $100, or that I can deliver a fully loaded AMD quad WITH a Geforce 210 AND a wireless keyboard/mouse combo and Win 7 HP X64, all for $550 while still making a decent profit? I certainly can't and my customers couldn't be happier with the performance. Not everyone is only worried about ePeen benchmarks you know.
As for TFA this isn't really surprising and the only shock is that Nvidia didn't do this sooner. Intel in their usual douchebag manner killed the Nvidia chipset business (again WTF? Where the hell is the antitrust already?) by refusing them the right to build on anything past LGA775, thus forcing everyone on Intel boards to have a craptastic Intel IGP whether you wanted it or not, so working out a deal to have SLI on AMD seems only natural.
To me the bigger question is why the hell don't they sell a 1x GPU board designed for PhysX. There are many of us I'm sure that don't have dual x16 boards that would be happy to buy an Nvidia chip just to add PhysX but screwing us over by disabling PhysX support if it detects an AMD GPU is just stupid, especially since that pretty much kills any point of having Nvidia on AMD with nearly all AMD boards having Radeon IGPs now. If they want to sell more GPUs a 1x board dedicated to PhysX would probably sell like hotcakes for those of us on AMD platforms.
Personally until they quit screwing us with the drivers I'll keep using Nvidia for strictly HTPCs (you can get a Geforce 210 for like $20 after MIR) and for those that want to game on the cheap sticking with the HD4850 (can't beat 256 bit pipeline for $60 refurb, and makes a cheap crossfire monster) or the HD5770.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In fairness to Intel, if you need pure bang, particularly if it is necessary that said bang be delivered to a single-threaded application, AMD has nothing on them.
However, as you say, AMD has plenty of more-than-fast-enough offerings that are dirt cheap, and tend to be supported by slightly cheaper motherboards. Given that many modern games tend to be GPU bound much of the time, gamers on budgets are generally pretty well served by cheaping out a bit on the CPU and going up a model or two on the GPU side. Since NVIDIA sells no CPUs(barring Tegra, which is irrelevant here) and no longer has a chipset business worthy of note, they'd be fools not to try to scoop up the "good enough AMD rig and enough cash left over for a slightly ludicrous video card" demographic.
Now, given Intel's strength, they aren't about to cancel SLI support on intel, despite being fucked over on the chipset side; but ignoring AMD doesn't make much sense.