Whoop-ass turns to groveling

NV Watch X58 gets SLI, Jen-Hsun gets egg on face
By Charlie Demerjian: Monday, 14 July 2008

JEN-HSUN'S CAN of Whoop-Ass was deflated pretty quickly as Nvidia kissed up to Intel and begged for SLI on x58. Without it, Nvidia loses, with it, users lose. To get SLI on the x58, you need the so-called nforce 200 SLI processor, otherwise known as a second rate PCIe bridge chip. This is the same part that took the excellent PCIe2 on Skulltrail and made it a mediocre higher latency PCIe1 implementation. It is the same part that the pretty broken 780i used to fake PCIe2 as well. According to Nvidia, it has "patented SLI technology for graphics bandwidth management and multi-GPU peer-to-peer communications, both required to optimize graphics performance." I am not sure how a simple almost-PCIe2 bridge chips does all this, but they sure charge a hell of a lot for it. The requirement part is easier, Nvidia breaks the drivers for those who don't pay up, and pay they do. Which brings us to the next part, NV is keen on extracting a pound of bills for everything that says SLI, and this is no exception. System makers will pay a bundle to put an inferior PCIe2 solution on their boards. In the end, the users get a vastly more expensive board that doesn't work as well, but has a sticker on it. This is progress?

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