Nvidia's Imminent Demise?

justjoel73

Looks like it is not going to be smooth sailing for Nvidia in the not to distant future if this story is true.
X-bit labs - Nvidia’s SLI May Disappear, or SLI Policy May Be Changed If Nvidia Fails to License Intel’s Next-Gen Processor Bus.
It maybe that Intel is trying to squeeze them out or position themselves to buy out Nvidia.
However it turns, we should know the future of Nvidia before the year's out. They could lose chipset business but win on their GPU side.

Judas

ouch nvidia..... suck it up and liecense out your SLI... intels bigger.... start kissing feet

BlueMak

Is SLI that big in terms of sales? I have yet to meet (in person) someone that uses SLI and the only people I do are from tech forums and even there they are a small minority.

justjoel73

I think the numbers are 6% of the market is Multi-GPU. Of that 6% , 90% are running SLI.

Cannyone

That sounds about right!

But I can't help but say that I saw this coming. Intel's chipsets will support SLI just as well as Nvidia's. So what they need to do is make a deal with Intel, then turn around and build a superior chipset. However, they can't continue to tell Intel to "p!$$ off!" regarding SLI and not have Intel react negatively.

mike2h

i think nv has been 'cuttuing of its nose to spite its face' on this one. originally it wasnt a that bad of an idea, but they jusy havent established themselves as a serious contender to intel chipsets like they wanted.
the have & r continuing to cut themselves out a nice chunk of market becuase of their stubborness. & while we dont know if intel is trying to stick it to them as far as fair dealing goes, you know they would like to have sli on their chipsets to.
the big thing that nv needs to deal with is that they need intel more than intel needs them.
i only get intel based mbs anymore, & while i prefer nv & think they do a better all around job with their graphic solutions, i am seriously considering going ati on my next upgrade - like my options better. while i am generally a single card kinda guy, buying a good card now, & buying it agian down the road for a much cheaper price for dual card setup when the single card starts slowing down is much cheaper than buying the best single card solution every couple of years.
& since im locked into intel that leaves ati as my main option.
i really think that they will have a 'meeting of the minds' on this one as it is in both companies best interest.

Zardon

Well this is not entirely true. if you have read my last Skulltrail preview http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=524 you will notice that the motherboard supports Quad graphics cards. Intel have stated to me that the board is perfectly capable of handling SLIx3 or even SLIx4 however Nvidia argued this is impossible. There is an interesting commentary on techreport about this:

Intel's Skulltrail dual-socket enthusiast platform - The Tech Report - Page 3

"So why did Intel do things this way? Because by incorporating Nvidia's chips, they could win Nvidia's blessing for SLI configurations on this motherboard. You'd think that simply paying a license fee to Nvidia would be sufficient, but Nvidia apparently wanted to maintain the (technical) fig leaf covering its true (business) reasons for locking third-party chipsets out of SLI. Nvidia continues to claim intermittently that the PCI Express implementations on its nForce chipsets contain special sauce to make SLI work. I'm not buying it. CrossFire works quite well on Intel's chipsets, and it's a very, very similar thing.

Anyhow, Intel played along and put Nvidia's PCIe 1.1 switch chips on the Skulltrail board—two of them, in fact, to make three- and four-way SLI possible. After all, doing so only makes a certain kind of sense when you're setting out to build an "ultimate" motherboard like this one.






Here's where things get sticky. I was all set to try out three-way SLI on our Skulltrail board, just for kicks, but when I asked Intel about this possibility, they told me I'd need to check with Nvidia about drivers to make it happen. When I asked Nvidia about it, I got this response:

3-way SLI is not supported on Skulltrail because the MCP bridge chip only supports communication between two graphics cards. There is no driver workaround for this.

Uh, yeah. At this point, I reminded the folks at Nvidia that Skulltrail's dual nForce 100 configuration is, if anything, more elegant than the switch-chip-plus-south-bridge mish-mash on the nForce 780i. I told them I wasn't buying it.






Then, I went back to Intel and got this official statement from them:

Mechanically and electrically, with 4 PCIe slots, Skulltrail can support up to 4 graphics cards. Drivers and validation and are up to the graphics card vendors as always.

Somewhere in a back room at Intel, as the PR rep uttered these words, an engineer must have bit his tongue in two.
A little later, I got an interesting reply from Nvidia essentially admitting its earlier explanation didn't make any sense. I'm still awaiting a better rationale from Nvidia, but if I were betting, I'd say we'll never see support for three- or four-way SLI on Skulltrail. "

____________________________________________

In my own discussions there are musings that SLIx3 would actually run better on Intel chipsets and that nvidia don't really like (or want this) - Slix2 already runs very well on intel boards. All you really need is a driver that forces peer to peer writes to enabled for unsupported Intel chipsets. NV force P2P to disable by driver and protect it with 17 encrypted keys. GBT hacked a driver around revision 163.xx to get this working however none of the new drivers have been broken as nvidia change encryption all the time.

it is a long complex scenario, the details of which i doubt will ever be made public (I have heard several things I can't really repeat in public), however these companies really do need to start getting on a little better, I am not sure I would want to take on Intel head to head, especially with Intel preparing an apparent "killer" graphics card for 2009. rumours of which are already floating around in private circles.

mike2h

thx for all the info z! good to get a honest viewpoint into their thinking.. such as it is
you think skulltrail will actually get any traction with the demise of fbdimm? integrating another mc would be major & cant see them doing it. unless it was a step to next platform/v.2.
i know these are basically 'showcase' platforms. tis a shame, cause if i thought there was going to be any longevity i would consider doing an upgrade path - a piece here, couple of pieces there..
oh well.

justjoel73

Skulltrail is nothing more then a glorified server board with SLI which will never work right. You would have to be some sort of moron(with deep pockets) to want a Skulltrail system to game on. Current easily available boards run circles around it. FB-DIMMS??? OMG the Intel engineers must be on crack and LSD at the same time.

Zardon

So what exactly is your point in relation to the SLI/Intel theories? This thread isn't really about the merits of Skulltrail, more about SLI/Nvidia/Intel and support.

incidentally SLI works perfectly fine on Skulltrail as you would see from the review. It actually works better on the skulltrail chipset that it does on some nvidia chipsets I have tested. Intel are really still the masters of chipsets, this really is not just specifically related to skulltrail.

BlueMak

I wonder if AMD knew exactly what it was doing by purchasing ATI. I can see some very interesting possibilities with the whole SLI thing and Intel making a good graphics card on their own.
Fascinating theories.

Zardon

Well as I said in the review, its really a showcase of their engineering prowess. The skulltrail setup is a CPU powerhouse with the capability to run SLi or Crossfire if so desired. It is certainly not mainstream, the price of the CPU's alone would fund a high end PC on their own. My skulltrail post is really just a basis for debating the relationship that Nvidia and Intel share in the current climate.

Zardon

Some people in Nvidia are sweating quite heavily right now. As a dual card solution SLI is my number one choice, but Nvidia's relationship with Intel seems strained right now. If going on my reports and reports such as you saw posted on techreport it appears that Nvidia are deliberately locking out specific intel chipsets and forcing end users to use their own boards for SLi solutions, even when a large percentage of the enthusiast user base feel that Intel chipsets are a more elegant solution. Again this is just subjective chat here and not my own views on the subject.

If Intel are making a killer graphics card standalone solution for release in the near future it stands to be believable with their engineering and technical knowledge that it would be a rather good solution, if not perhaps in the early days of release. Their company value is reckoned to be 10 times that of Nvidia who are already worth 4 times as much as AMD (who are now worth less than what they paid for ATI), so going on this, there should be considerable resources for Intel R&D.

I would personally say that 2009/2010 is going to be fascinating for us consumers, I can't wait to see how this all plays out.

mike2h

most peeps arent aware that intel is the worlds leading gpu manafacturer by a significant margin. if i was nv, i wouldnt want to piss them of to much.
as for intel buying nv, i dont think so. i would asssume nv has some sort of 'poison pill' to prevent hostlie takeover. the other thing you have is, that nv really has no value for intel. it is basically an 'ip' company & has no fabs to speak of. intel is already doing better in the chipset dept, & if they really wanted to, could spend the $$ to get caught up/surpass nv in the gpu dept.
i think a takeover/buyout of nv buy intel would be bad for us to.

Judas

intel has tons of resources at thier disposal to kill anything they want..

they are essentially the microsoft of the hardware portion of the industry imo...

It's just a matter of them choosing to do what they want and seeing emediate gains from it.


And considering that intel probably wouldn't want nvidia to start with.. it'd be to much of a mass mess of crap to work with to go through a hostile take over just for them... and obviously amd/ati is outa the question...

leaving only via's gpu department which is essentially dead atm which intel hasn't ever looked at as far as i know.

Bitboys??? have no clue there at all..... that's age old now.. hell probably didn't remember thier name right

PowerVR, which is still a working right along in the shadows.. producing mostly mobile graphics chips (they design them, and get someone else to fab them).... one of thier biggest winners in the liecensing is intel.

PowerVR is the only thing i can think of that would likely bring great interest to intel in terms of a powerhouse gpu. PowerVR's TBR will still blow the doors of anything nvidia or ati could spit out while using 1/4 or even less the horse power. Considering that overdraw is getting higher, this is where tbr excells.. and it gets bigger bonuses yet from FSAA and Different filteirng methods. (i miss my kyro 2 hercules 4500 card.. it would scream around the geforce 2 gts and ultra like they were snails... with specs that would seem like the mx series was monsterous)

It's to bad STMicro dropped powervr kyro lineup like a rock....... But alas, nothing better then a absalutely amazing and steller comeback.... which i've been waiting for... for years....

temeteus82

Judas: Bitboys was bought by ATI in 2006 so they are now part of AMD. I think that they are still making dev work for mobile gpu's

Zardon

Judas ....... i can't even begin to reply to this. I think I need a swift drink now.

mike2h

lmao.

justjoel73

Multi-GPUS is not where the money is at right now. Its all about China, and overall consumer market. AMD is poised to put up some huge numbers this year. I don't know if you guys have been following threads about AMD but I have. The RS780 IGP is taking China by a storm with huge sales figures. You guys probably don't hit the Chinese websites, it may be worth your while to use a web translator to check them out. ASUS just placed a huge .5-1.0 million CPU order with AMD. Dell is going to be shipping a whole bunch of low cost 3 core Phenom based system. Hybrid crossfire and the ability to crossfire 2 different cards is going to be pretty big too(I really like the idea of not tossing my old GPU in the trash when I upgrade). I see AMD's stock price doubling despite the fact they have crappy CPUs. The only reason they reported a multi billion dollar loss last year was because of a write down due to the ATI acquisition(tax savings baby!). Their actual operating loss was only $9 million. I would pick up some AMD stock now while it is still in the shitter.

Judas

really?


i musta missed that at one point...

there was a quite a number of things durring 2005 and 2006 that i missed...

Judas

Z. why?

I can't think of any other company that designs gpu's that intel could possibly be interested in using.

PowerVR is the only one i can think of.... using MBX and newer revisions.... i wouldn't doubt that pvr would have always sitting on a back burning, a midrange, highend design constantly being tuned and updated as they go just in case someone out there with fabs asks and they are ready to whip em out.

plus it would be dirt cheap for intel to manage, low cost.... high gain.

Zardon

Intel don't really need to buy anyone, they have enough expertise to create their own hardware, and they certainly don't need to buy PowerVR either Judas, that company was pretty inventive years ago but they don't have the resources or technology now to cope with guys like Nvidia.

I think you need to stop looking through rose tinted glasses at 8 year old technology.