Today marks a momentous occasion in the tech universe, as two of the giant opposing forces; Intel and NVIDIA, have somehow reached an agreement.
Any moment now, we're expecting NVIDIA to announce that it has managed to get hold of a QPI license from Intel. As a result of the surprise deal, NVIDIA will be bringing SLI support to Intel's forthcoming X58-based boards, but it won't be quite so simple.
The method used to add SLI support to X58 mirrors that of the solution found on Intel's Skulltrail platform. It'll involve adding an nF200 bridging chip to Intel boards at a cost of roughly $30. The question is, on what will be an expensive board at launch, who'll be willing to pay in the region of an extra $30 for what remains a very niche feature?
The real winner, it seems, is Intel. AMD no longer has the luxury of being the only manufacturer to offer multiple-GPU solutions based around X58, and NVIDIA can only do it at an inflated price.
We're expecting NVIDIA to make the announcement within the hour, and we'll be bringing you more details as and when we have them.
*Update*
NVIDIA has issued its official press release, and it isn't quite the news we anticipated. As it turns out, NVIDIA doesn't have a QPI license, sorry folks. What it has, is simply the ability to add its NVIDIA nForce 200 SLI processor to Intel's X58 chipset.
Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of GPU business at NVIDIA, said:
With GeForce-based visual computing application, our customers are experiencing exciting new ways to interact with their photos and videos while also experiencing the bone-chilling realism from our latest graphics processors. Our SLI technology allows us to combine the power of hundreds of GeForce processing cores in multi-GPU configurations with Intel’s latest CPUs for platforms that are sure to excite our customers.
Official press release: NVIDIA BRINGS SLI TECHNOLOGY TO INTEL BLOOMFIELD CPU PLATFORMS
