Hell Freezes Over: NVIDIA Announces Native SLI Support for the Intel X58 Chipset
by Anand Shimpi & Laura Johnston on August 28, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Why is NVIDIA doing this?
NVIDIA was clear in mentioning that it will continue to design chipsets for Penryn based platforms, but it will not be making any QPI enabled chipsets for Nehalem. Thus, with Nehalem, the only way to get SLI support would be to use an Intel chipset.
Note that NVIDIA will be making LGA-1160 based Nehalem motherboards (dual-channel DDR3) for the low end and mainstream markets, but that platform isn't expected to debut until late 2009. LGA-1366 based Nehalem systems (dual/triple-channel DDR3) are the ones launching this year and the ones that NVIDIA won't have a chipset for.
NVIDIA originally expected OEMs to use its nForce 200 chips to enable SLI support on X58, however we heard from the very start that most motherboard manufacturers weren’t going to use the nForce 200 + Intel X58 combination. If NVIDIA wanted to offer SLI on Nehalem, it would have to open it up to all X58 motherboards, otherwise AMD could actually gain a multi-GPU advantage by being the only multi-GPU technology natively supported by Nehalem.
The timing of the announcement is very last-minute. Most motherboard manufacturers weren’t even aware that NVIDIA was opening up SLI to X58 until tonight, they received phone calls shortly after NVIDIA briefed us earlier this evening.
NVIDIA is committed to enabling X58 SLI motherboard support by the time Nehalem launches later this year. We were also told that while Intel’s own X58 motherboard isn’t currently on the certified list, Intel is more than welcome to submit it for certification.
NVIDIA went even further to say that if we were previewing any X58 motherboards that hadn’t yet made it through certification, that it would work with us to get our hands on a driver enabling SLI on the motherboard. It remains to be seen how easy it will be to simply hack in support for SLI on any X58 motherboard, regardless of certification status.
And there you have it: in response to the complaint of no-new-news out of NVISION 08, NVIDIA dropped the biggest bombshell of them all - native SLI support on X58. While I’d like to see top-to-bottom SLI support regardless of chipset, this is most definitely a good start.
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Slaimus - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
Remember the days of ULi chipsets that support "GLi" with Nvidia graphics cards? This is not the first time SLi has been used on non-Nvidia chipsets.Besides, hell was already frozen after AMD-ATI merger.
IcePickFreak - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
It's obvious they've looked into Lucid's Hydra and seen impending doom for the nvidia chipset so they're trying to cash in while they can.You heard that totally unsupported rumor here first!
ltcommanderdata - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
The article mentions that nVidia won't be making LGA-1366 chipsets themselves so it makes sense that they would have to open up SLI a bit in order to get it into the high-end platform. However, the article said that nVidia will be making LGA-1160 chipsets. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but processors on the LGA-1160 socket will have integrated PCIe controllers will they not? The processors will have an IMC, a PCIe controller, and an IGP, and the only thing going out is a DMI link to the southbridge. It seems to me, if nVidia wants to get SLI into the all important mainstream market, they are going to have to license SLI to Intel itself so that the PCIe controller in their processors can be certified. Which will be an interesting concept, having nVidia certify Intel processors.DigitalFreak - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
"Hell freezing over" would be if Nvidia allowed SLI on any board without "certification" (ie: scam) like ATI. This announcement is at most "Hell got a bit colder".wingless - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
Now if 4Ghz Phenom FX-80s beating 5Ghz Kentsfields is confirmed, it truly will be a chilly day in hades!Also if this is just a BIOS key or driver fix, then somebody will make a custom BIOS/Driver to enable SLI on ANY motherboard!
Amiga500 - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
The 4 GHz K10.5 is almost certainly rubbish.4 GHz @ 1.168V?
Not likely.
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
If the nVIDIA driver install routine checks for the presence of an x58 chipset on install then hacking the BIOS alone won’t fool it so don’t expect support on other chipsets via hacked BIOSs. Unless that can be hacked also!“Let's just say you've let the cat out of the bag at a big site that most manufacturers frequent. Being clever involves being shrewed, you are clearly lacking in the latter.”
Because nVIDIA never would have guessed that would they! LOL. Surely most BIOSs are machine specific so they will fail to load on other systems no matter how similar the boards!
mindless1 - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
There may be two factors.1) They only mentioned checking for a key not hardware details.
2) Is it really in nVidia's best interest to prevent hackers from allowing SLI on other chipsets? What does this do? nVidia already lost a chipset sale if they had another chipset, but if SLI is allowed they at least have another GPU sale if the hack was ever to be useful.
JSquires - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
"NVIDIA provides the board manufacturer with a key to place in its BIOS."Lets say a motherboard manufacturer makes two similar boards, one with SLI support but one without. How about you flash the bios of the cheaper one to make it support SLI?
Berger - Thursday, August 28, 2008 - link
Let's just say you've let the cat out of the bag at a big site that most manufacturers frequent. Being clever involves being shrewed, you are clearly lacking in the latter.Berger