Wait, NVIDIA unlocking SLI on ALL chipsets?

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jebo_4jc

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According to Theo

One of results of yesterday’s Q4′08 financial results call was the decision to finally unlock the SLI technology for every multi-GPU compliant chipset on the market. Intel licensed the SLI technology for their own chipsets, and now you can expect that future versions of GeForce drivers will automatically allow you to enable SLI technology on every multi-GPU motherboard. Now, if you own a machine with Athlon 64, Core 2, Core i5, i7, Phenom, Phenom II and other processors - it doesn’t matter, since a simple driver update will enable SLI technology on it.

This is a big change from its crude policy about “SLI on SLI chipsets, thus Nvidia chipsets”, and nothing else but evidence that competition is good for you. If ATI didn’t came resurgent in summer ‘08, who knows would we ever see a press release with this content. Ujesh Desai, vice president of GeForce desktop business at NVIDIA stated that “Gamers know that the best way to experience their games is with GeForce GPUs, and now they will be able to harness the power of multiple GPUs for even more performance and immersion features.”

Intel was really happy with this licensing deal as well, as witnessed by Clem Russo, VP and General Manager of Channel Desktop Platform Group at Intel Corporation. “The pairing of our new Core i7 processors on our Extreme Series motherboard and NVIDIA GeForce graphics has resulted in some of the world’s fastest consumer gaming PC platforms. For playing any of today’s hottest PC titles, this is one awesome combination that our customers have been asking for.”

Good to see some humble pie from Nvidia, now we can probably all move on and have apple-to-apple comparisons on equal platforms. We will see what this means for Nvidia’s chipset division, that is increasingly moving towards creation of System-on-Chip products.I would not be surprised to see future nForce chipset looking exactly like Tegra chipset with more powerful graphics. The only question looms… was dumbing down the nForce brand a smart or a very stupid idea?

ATI CrossFire vs. Nvidia SLI in 2009 will take an interesting turn indeed… we only wonder how pissed ASUS and EVGA will be, two companies that heavily invested in building their top-line motherboards with nForce 200 bridge chip?
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I'm guessing he's wrong. No mention of it on other sites.

A couple other sites reporting Intel licensed SLI for their X58 motherboard, which I'm thinking Theo may have confused.
 
Why do you think?
Money

To sell their chipsets
 
jebo_4jc said:
I'm guessing he's wrong. No mention of it on other sites.

A couple other sites reporting Intel licensed SLI for their X58 motherboard, which I'm thinking Theo may have confused.
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Correct, here is the official statement that was released by Nvidia.

Nvidia Press Release said:
NVIDIA SLI Technology Now Available For INTEL Branded X58-Based Motherboards

All Intel i7 Platforms, Including the Intel “Smackover” Motherboard, Now Available with NVIDIA SLI Technology
For further information, contact:

Bryan Del Rizzo
NVIDIA Corporation
(408) 486-2772
bdelrizzo@nvidia.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

SANTA CLARA, CA—FEBRUARY 11, 2009—NVIDIA Corporation today announced that Intel Corporation has licensed NVIDIA® SLI™ technology for inclusion on the Intel® DX58SO motherboard for the Intel® Core i7 processor. As a result, customers with Intel X58-based motherboards and the Core i7 processor can now equip their PCs with any combination of NVIDIA GeForce® GPUs, including Quad SLI, for the ultimate visual computing experience.

“The addition of NVIDIA SLI technology to the Intel DX58SO motherboard has been a welcome addition,” said Clem Russo, VP and General Manager of Channel Desktop Platform Group at Intel Corporation. “The pairing of our new Core i7 processors on our Extreme Series motherboard and NVIDIA GeForce graphics has resulted in some of the world’s fastest consumer gaming PC platforms. For playing any of today’s hottest PC titles, this is one awesome combination that our customers have been asking for.”

As a result of today’s announcement, NVIDIA SLI technology is now available for all consumer PC platforms, including the Intel Core i7, Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo processors, as well as those based on the AMD Phenom II CPU. In addition to raw graphics performance, NVIDIA GeForce GPUs also provide gamers with additional capabilities not found on any other discrete graphics solutions, including NVIDIA PhysX® technology for deeper gaming immersion, stereoscopic 3D gaming with NVIDIA 3D Vision technology, and support for CUDA®, a revolutionary new computing architecture that harnesses the power of the NVIDIA GPU to accelerate everyday computing applications including video transcoding, physics calculations, and high-definition video playback.

“The Intel X58 ‘Smackover’ board is excellent, with fantastic build quality and great performance, and now with the inclusion of SLI it is full steam ahead,” said Kriss Pomroy, Commercial Director at Novatech. “We are extremely excited that we can now spec Intel motherboards in many of our systems and capitalize on the awesome performance of NVIDIA SLI technology. It is what we have all been waiting for here at Novatech.”

“Finally, the Intel Smackover experience is complete. At Paradigit we’ve been using this board since launch, but we thought that this may not last long because of the lack of SLI support,” said Niels Van Echteld, Purchasing Manager for Paradigit. “Now this board is ready for the best of both worlds--Intel’s newest Core i7 CPU and the power of NVIDA GeForce in SLI!”

“The ability to have SLI, PhysX, and CUDA on an Intel chipset is a great move for the market,” said Elan Raja III, Director of Scan Computers. “The combination of technologies will break all the existing performance barriers raising the standard for the power user. The wait is finally over!”

“There's no doubt about it... our customers love SLI,” said Randy Copeland, CEO of Velocity Computers. “With this announcement, we have the ability to build them any Intel i7 platform they want, and know that whatever motherboard we choose, we can populate it with multiple NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. This gives our customers the greatest flexibility in purchasing the world's fastest gaming PCs.”

“NVIDIA SLI has proven to be the industry’s only stable, scalable, high-performance multi-GPU platform, and we are excited that customers with Intel branded X58 motherboards will be able to take advantage of this processing power,” said Ujesh Desai, vice president of GeForce desktop business at NVIDIA. “Gamers know that the best way to experience their games is with GeForce GPUs, and now they will be able to harness the power of multiple GPUs for even more performance and immersion features.”

For more information on NVIDIA PhysX technology, please visit: www.nvidia.com/sli
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too bad, id drop another card on my x48 board, but im not upgrading to an x58 setup for a while, way too expensive atm
 
I think that alot of people read too much into this release.
All I did was read it.

1) nvidia licensed SLi for the already released Smackover, recall that initially, the Intel branded X58 board was Crossfire only, while ASUS, Gigabyte,EVGA,DFI and others licensed SLi for their X58 boards from the jump.

2) Yes......you now have the ability to use SLi with any Intel CPU and AMD CPU......providing that the motherboard has an nvidia chipset.......EXCEPT for the Skulltrail and the Smackover motherboards......which have licensed SLi separately.....and the newly released X58 chipset motherboards mentioned above.

That's what I get from the release by nvidia. NOT that SLI will all of a sudden be available on every motherboard past and present.:D
 
magoo said:
I think that alot of people read too much into this release.
All I did was read it.

1) nvidia licensed SLi for the already released Smackover, recall that initially, the Intel branded X58 board was Crossfire only, while ASUS, Gigabyte,EVGA,DFI and others licensed SLi for their X58 boards from the jump.

2) Yes......you now have the ability to use SLi with any Intel CPU and AMD CPU......providing that the motherboard has an nvidia chipset.......EXCEPT for the Skulltrail and the Smackover motherboards......which have licensed SLi separately.....and the newly released X58 chipset motherboards mentioned above.

That's what I get from the release by nvidia. NOT that SLI will all of a sudden be available on every motherboard past and present.:D
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Bingo! X58 series motherboards that have SLI licensed through Nvidia are joined by the DX58SO which Nvidia licensed to run SLI. X48, X38, P45 all continue as usual without SLI. AMD boards that already had SLI enabled remain that way, while 790FX/790GX and other AMD Crossfire boards remain Crossfire only.
 
I think it depends on how much Nvidia is hurting. They might open up SLI on everything to help boost vid card sales.
 
I think we won't see that unless they are paid. I doubt they are giving it away, otherwise Intel would've had them enable it on X38, X48, P45. I am sure it was beneficial to Intel to license it on the DX58SO because it gave them incentive for OEM usage. No SLI was a killing point, now they can try to use that to get their board into OEMs. Saves the OEMs money because they can use a cheaper board and still be able to offer SLI/Crossfire.
 
NOOO

that mean is I have to continue my EVGA 780i.....

I hate nVidia chipset board :mad:

hopefully they unlock X38/X48 SLI...

I am not a fan of i7, so I am so not going to upgrade X58 until overall price drop to where it should be.......
 
KrylonArt said:
I think we won't see that unless they are paid. I doubt they are giving it away, otherwise Intel would've had them enable it on X38, X48, P45. I am sure it was beneficial to Intel to license it on the DX58SO because it gave them incentive for OEM usage. No SLI was a killing point, now they can try to use that to get their board into OEMs. Saves the OEMs money because they can use a cheaper board and still be able to offer SLI/Crossfire.
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Yes, I think you are spot on.
Of course, Intel may do like all the others and now make an uber X58 board......much like the ASUS extreme whatever, the Gigabyte extreme whatever and the yet to be released EVGA "Classified".:eek:
 
I have an Intel Bad Axe 2 motherboard, and the scuttlebutt was that for a little while, there were some unofficial beta (maybe hacked) chipset drivers and/or BIOS updates (I wasn't quite clear exactly what) that would allow SLI on this Crossfire board, but they became impossible to use with subsequent drivers/software/hardware.

The point being that many, if not most, Crossfire motherboards probably require nothing more than BIOS and/or chipset driver updates to enable SLI, but licensing is the sticking point and will probably only happen on an individual basis.
 
Any chance of getting this confirmed as to weather SLI will be enabled on all current Intel Chipsets x38,x48,P35,P45 etc.
 
Yeah hope this is true. I thought the NVIDIA chipsets especially the 780i was horrible, too many issues, argh.

NVIDIA should have unlocked their SLI technology for all chipsets a long time ago.
 
KrylonArt said:
I think we won't see that unless they are paid. I doubt they are giving it away, otherwise Intel would've had them enable it on X38, X48, P45. I am sure it was beneficial to Intel to license it on the DX58SO because it gave them incentive for OEM usage. No SLI was a killing point, now they can try to use that to get their board into OEMs. Saves the OEMs money because they can use a cheaper board and still be able to offer SLI/Crossfire.
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Enabling SLI on all other chipsets would theoretically open up SLI to a whole new market. People who might not want to do a full upgrade can just BUY another Nvidia card and drop it into their existing system. It might be a short term boost in sales for Nvidia.

Other than that, I wouldn't imagine there is any reason Nvidia would purposely open up SLI, although, I'm not sure how the driver would know which board it's being installed on.
 
Good. that would mean that they should stop making horrible chipset. My one experience with them have scarred me for life.
 
htphm42 said:
Good. that would mean that they should stop making horrible chipset. My one experience with them have scarred me for life.
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They aren't THAT bad. I've used a couple of them and as long as you aren't OCing, they aren't that bad.
 
kirbyrj said:
They aren't THAT bad. I've used a couple of them and as long as you aren't OCing, they aren't that bad.
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Yeah, OC was out of the question. My problem was its tendency of randomly not booting :mad:. That was unacceptable. It turned out that it was a common problem too :rolleyes:. So yeah, Im sticking with intel for a while.
 
htphm42 said:
Yeah, OC was out of the question. My problem was its tendency of randomly not booting :mad:. That was unacceptable. It turned out that it was a common problem too :rolleyes:. So yeah, Im sticking with intel for a while.
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I had a pretty good experience with the eVGA 650i cheap board. It worked decently and even OC'd a little bit. I was using it with a Pentium D 805 chip. Obviously, not a C2D or something similar, but it worked well.
 
Neat to hear this! About time they stop being greedy!

No idea when we'll get it working though...
 
kirbyrj said:
Enabling SLI on all other chipsets would theoretically open up SLI to a whole new market. People who might not want to do a full upgrade can just BUY another Nvidia card and drop it into their existing system. It might be a short term boost in sales for Nvidia.

Other than that, I wouldn't imagine there is any reason Nvidia would purposely open up SLI, although, I'm not sure how the driver would know which board it's being installed on.
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Opening up SLI on all chipsets would open up a whole new market. But from Intel's perspective it would also not give enough incentive to P45/X38/X48 users to switch to the latest and greatest. Why go X58 for SLI/Crossfire when you can just keep using your Q9650 with the newest Nvidia/ATI offerings on your P45/X38/X48? Enabling P45/X38/X48 to have SLI may slow the adoption rate for X58.

MittWaffen said:
Neat to hear this! About time they stop being greedy!

No idea when we'll get it working though...
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Bios notes. Bios update 3435 is available now.
 
Well i know about the X58 already, im curious when other (older) chip sets will open up to us.
 
Intel only licensed the DX58SO (which initially did not have an SLI license). No other chipsets were licensed to run SLI.
 
Interesting, I thought only the X58 chipset would be the only non Nvidia chipset to feature SLi.
 
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