Igor said:
Before you get too excited, what do you think of that architecture ?
It looks like there is a bottleneck there. The Nvidia 200 isn't doing
you any favors. The Xbitlabs article seems to be saying the end
result will be half bandwidth for PCI Express 2.0 capable graphics
cards. (It is not the end of the world, but it still a bit of a
kludge. Sort of like a lot of the boards in the past that did x8/x8 on
two x16 sized video card slots.)
I think there is another encouraging sign present in that architecture
picture. Nvidia 200 wasn't created to help this chipset. It was created
to allow more GX2 style dual video cards to be produced. And if that
happens, it means you don't absolutely need an SLI motherboard.
You could get an Intel board with only one PCI Express 2.0 slot and
a GX2 style video card.
The other thing to note about Nvidia 200, is that it has the
ability to support four devices at the same time. That means
someone could make a "single slot" quad GPU video card if they
wanted.
It looks a lot like Nvidia is switching its future evolution
in such a way, that the SLI business is no longer dependent
on them having a viable chipset business. In other words, when
Intel has crushed all chipset resistance from the other players,
Nvidia will still have single, dual, and quad GPU video cards
to sell for fat profits (all plugging into a single slot). The
only tech limit will be cooling. That is a way to offer higher
performance products, without making ever-larger GPU silicon.
Paul
