Nvidia Licenses SLI to AMD, Did Hell Freeze Over?
Nvidia Licenses SLI to AMD, Did Hell Freeze Over?
Posted 04/28/2011 at 7:23am
| by Paul Lilly
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So what if Nvidia and AMD make unlikely bed fellows, and who cares that the two are currently duking it out in the discrete graphics market? Certainly not Joe Gamer, the unbiased enthusiast who only wants to build the best gaming machine his budget will allow. Unfortunately for Joe, his decisions have always been partially dictated by artificial compatibility constraints, and the decision to roll with multiple Nvidia or AMD graphics cards depends on his choice of platform. Not anymore, folks!
Nvidia has chosen to bury the hatchet with AMD and finally license its SLI technology on AMD motherboards. We'll let that sink in for a moment... This bears repeating, in case you didn't believe what you just read. Nvidia, who became AMD's arch-nemesis when the CPU maker picked up ATI, is going to allow AMD chipsets to support SLI!
"Long term gamers probably remember that for a long time AMD offered great high-end CPUs, but in recent years, AMD’s stature as the preferred gaming CPU fell by the wayside and Intel CPUs have been the gamers’ choice," Nvidia said in a blog post. "For this reason, we’ve only licensed SLI for motherboards with Intel chipsets. However, we’ve been recently hearing chants of 'SLI for AMD CPUs', and figured that now is a great time to do it. After all, we want to make sure gamers can benefit from the new CPU competitive landscape and ensure they have NVIDIA SLI – the highest performance, most stable multi-GPU solution - to game on! According to Steam, 93% of all multi-GPU systems in use today use SLI."
We're not buying Nvidia's explanation that AMD has only just now picked up its game to where SLI would be a good fit, and that chants of 'SLI for AMD CPUs' were non-existent up to this point, but who cares, the point is you'll finally be able to build a system based almost entirely on your budget and not on compatibility concerns.
This doesn't mean you should rush out and pick up a second Nvidia videocard for your 890FX motherboard, it won't work. However, Nvidia did license SLI for AMD's upcoming chipsets, including 990FX, 990X, and 970.
"Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI are among the first motherboard manufacturers to offer this new capability, with more coming on board shortly," Nvidia said.
Rock on.
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davet
June 18, 2011 at 6:51am
It angers me how as soon as a new proc or socket comes out for Intel, MaximumPC jumps all over it, but when AMD releases anything, it gets bare minimum attention. Maybe MPC should give Intel products a "Kiss Ass" award. I love MaximumPC but the clear bias is undeniable.
elo231
April 29, 2011 at 8:42am
In the past, AMD boards that can support SLI is because it's got a nForce chipset. Right now SLI can be supported natively in future AMD chipsets without the need of a nForce chip? That's the good news right?
m31337
April 29, 2011 at 5:06am
AMD is paying NVIDIA for the tech to allow system builders to buy more NVIDIA products. It's Genius!
tornato7
April 28, 2011 at 5:59pm
Could I just say, I'm currently running SLI on an AMD board. nVidia has 940a SLI boards and stuff for AMD. Awesome motherboard.
kixofmyg0t
April 28, 2011 at 12:48pm
Across from me sits a AMD Athlon 64 X2 powered rig with a Geforce 8800 GTS 640MB....pretty old yes but im gonna build a new one latter this year.
I liked nVidia up until Fermi.
aarcane
April 28, 2011 at 12:44pm
Not enough Intel SLI boards, they want to expand their market share. it's simple.
0ly1r3m@1ns
April 28, 2011 at 10:58am
i was going to build a new computer come this x mas and i realy wanted sli but hate the prices on intel this this THIS IS GREAT THX nVIDIA!
0ly1r3m@1ns
April 28, 2011 at 10:58am
i was going to build a new computer come this x mas and i realy wanted sli but hate the prices on intel this this THIS IS GREAT THX nVIDIA!
CTskifreak
April 28, 2011 at 12:49pm
What prices are you looking at? Sandy Bridge processor have such a sweet price to performance ratio it's ridiculous.
carnivorousslushee23
April 28, 2011 at 3:09pm
I assume he refers to the motherboard prices. AMD MBs are invariably cheaper than Intel MBs, whatever the price/performance ratio for Intel procs. It's what kept me from going with Intel - I could have gone with an i5 or something, but all the Intel MBs were too expensive for my price range. So I opted for a 955BE and 790X with support for DDR2.
someuid
April 28, 2011 at 10:21am
Whatever the reasons being put forth, I'm pretty sure they are not the true reasons behind this.
All kinds of possibilities (or conspiracy theories - take your pick!) come to mind.
Intel wants its own hegemony: chipset, high speed external connection (lightspeed), GPU (Sandy Bridge). They don't want anyone else mucking around in their ecosystem. Nvidia sees the writing on the wall and is opening up their options to jump ship and go somewhere else with their tech.
-or-
AMD and Nvidia had some secret backroom talks about Intel and their "we'll do our own GPU m'kay thanks get lost" and decided the future will be down to Intel and a competitor. AMD either needs to push all their talent into the CPU to catch up to Intel and get someone else to handle the GPU side of the house, or needs some fresh talent to pour into their CPUs teams while they leave their GPU team alone. Merging with Nvidia is the way to do this.
-or-
AMD and Nvidia see the writting on the wall and that Intel is looking to take them both down via the GPUs, giving Intel yet another selling point to customers to just buy their CPU and no one elses. AMD and Nvidia are looking to bury the hatchet, combine knowledge, and wallop the crap out of Intel's GPU efforts, giving customers continued reason to consider AMD CPUs.
-or-
Everything is in complete disarray at Intel closing up their ecoystem (their CPU, their chipset, their GPU, their external connectors (lightbridge)) and this is only the first "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" deal we're going see as redundant tech gets merged, and really good tech gets shoved to the wastebin by another, lesser tech, which is allowed to succeed based on marekting and integration alone.
I see the computer world centering around Intel vs AMD/ATI-Nvidia-ARM-etc. I totally expect to see these smaller companies gobble up one another. It is the only way they can compete against the jauggernaut that Intel has become.
I remember Andy Grove stating "Only the paranoid survive." I don't see Intel being very paranoid. I wonder if they are cresting, getting bold, and will start having trouble soon as they drive away what could have been good business partners (why didn't Intel just buy Nvidia?)
Caboose
April 28, 2011 at 12:36pm
"AMD and Nvidia see the writting on the wall and that Intel is looking to take them both down via the GPUs, giving Intel yet another selling point to customers to just buy their CPU and no one elses"
This will NEVER happen. Intel can't build a GPU to save their lives. With how advanced AMD and nVidia are in the GPU market Intel doesn't stand a chance. Heck their last couple attempts at entering the descrete video market crashed and burned before it even got off the ground. Heck even their IGP solutions are absolute garbage and being overtaken by the likes of AMD and nVidia.
Keith E. Whisman
April 28, 2011 at 9:52am
This is a sure sign of the end times, the lion shy lay with the lamb and the cat with the dog and mouse. Nvidia with the AMD.
Neufeldt2002
April 28, 2011 at 9:43am
Makes sense to me. If I remember correctly, didn't nVidia recently state that they were getting out of the chipset scene? Thus licensing their SLI tech on AMD boards makes sense to increase potential market share. As well, I agree that the chanting has been going on for some time.
Please make publish to facebook opt-in, not opt-out.
Slurpy
April 28, 2011 at 9:16am
This doesn't mean you should rush out and pick up a second Nvidia videocard for your 890FX motherboard, it won't work.
Is it really necessary to dumb the article down this much? Anyone who assumes that this agreement is going to magically change the hardware in his box deserves what he gets.
spRICE
April 28, 2011 at 10:20am
You obviously don't know how SLI works. SLI has nothing to do with the hardware of the chipset. It relies solely on the nVidia drivers. If nVidia wanted to, they could allow SLI on any chipset with a simple driver update. This can be seen by that Russian driver hack that allows SLI on any chipset that doesn't support SLI.
Therefore, it was necessary information that this wouldn't allow SLI on existing AMD chipsets because it is possible that nVidia would allow SLI on 890 chipsets etc.
Keith E. Whisman
April 28, 2011 at 1:08pm
If it's all firmware and drivers then why do Intel boards require the Nforce 200 chip on their motherboards to enable SLI? If boards don't have that chip are you going to experience reduced performance verses systems with the Nforce 200 chip?
MattyMattMatt
April 28, 2011 at 2:50pm
I don't know where you get your information, but I don't think it could be more wrong.
Look at any 8/8 1155 board. NF200? Fuck no. SLI? Hell yeah. The NF200 is only used by higher end boards to put more PCIe lanes on it. It has absolutely nothing to do with SLI. SLI is all software side. This is a known fact.
Hg Dragon
April 28, 2011 at 10:12am
Perhaps people who didn't read the linked blog post (where it's spelled out what chipsets will work) might assume that their old boards could work in SLI mode after some upcoming firmware/driver updates.
Hardly a reason to have that much of an attitude.
noobstix
April 28, 2011 at 8:44am
I remember my old Gigabyte board (which I have since given to my oldest brother), was an AMD CPU mobo with an Nvidia chipset. When I bought the board, I was pretty much like "Joe Newbie" so I didn't think much of it. Now that I think about it, it was a bit strange. I guess now the ratio of Radeon-Geforce GPUs will heavily favor Geforces in the future (I almost bought a Geforce to replace my 5770).
Caboose
April 28, 2011 at 10:19am
What was wrong w/your 5770? I've got 2 in Crossfire and they are working great. Nothing is slowing them down!
chronium
April 28, 2011 at 8:02am
For a second there I thought AMD was going to be dropping crossfire and swiching to SLI.
MattyMattMatt
April 28, 2011 at 2:43pm
Why would they considering the current crossfire performance?
docb77
April 28, 2011 at 7:34am
What I would love to see is someone finding a way to have both an nvidia gpu and an ati gpu in the same system. I would love to have the best of both worlds.
Caboose
April 28, 2011 at 8:04am
I'd like that too. So that I can use my ATi (AMD) GPUs for gaming, and the nVidia for PhysX for the couple of games that support it!
themohawkadmin
April 28, 2011 at 7:41am
There is such a thing, it's called Lucid Hydra. It has it's own proprietary chipset that can divide up gpu work to each video card, regardless of what gpu's are in the system.
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