Nvidia, Intel End Standoff as SLI Added To X58 Chipset

In a move to boost both companies, Nvidia announced it will provide native Scalable Link Interface support on Intel’s X58 chipset, which is due in the fourth quarter. Nvidia’s nForce 200 SLI architecture aggregates multiple graphics cards in separate PCI slots and runs them as one card for greater performance.

“Intel and Nvidia have finally come to their senses,” said analyst Jon Peddie of JPR, a leading GPU, multimedia and gaming analysis group in Tiburon, CA. The two companies have been in a standoff.

Until now, Nvidia has held all the cards in the SLI game, dealing out licenses for its chipset to motherboard manufacturers such as Gigatrend and aBit. Since many board makers rely heavily on gaming enthusiasts — a market where Nvidia’s GForce GPUs are a top player — they bought Nvidia’s chipsets by the bucket load, despite reports that competing chipsets had no technical limits with Nvidia’s multi-GPU cards.

However, heat issues, motherboard elbow room, and the cost of the nForce 200 gave some board makers pause, according to reports. Some industry insiders even speculated that Nvidia would get out of the chipset market entirely.

Not so, said Peddie and sources at Nvidia. “They will have some chipset announcements in October,” he said. Nonetheless, this announcement by Nvidia pretty much underscores that the nForce 200 had very little proprietary technology other than helping to create a licensing market for Nvidia’s SLI.

Cashing in Chipsets

Others believe the chipset market is ripe for a shake-up. In an interview with Custom PC earlier this month, chipset maker VIA Technologies admitted the business is being swallowed up by Intel and AMD.

Richard Brown, VIA’s vice president of marketing, said the Taiwan-based company, once the leader in CPU support chips, is moving into the X86 market instead.

Nvidia and Intel’s Gain

Virtually any well-designed chipset, including Intel’s X58, can…