For the past few years, if you've wanted to gang together two NVIDIA cards in an SLI configuration, you've been restricted to using an Intel CPU. But that's soon going to change. NVIDIA has announced that it is licensing its SLI technology to motherboard makers for use with AMD CPUs, so that AMD's upcoming, performance-oriented Bulldozer chip can be used with a pair of NVIDIA GPUs.
"We are pleased to announce that SLI has been licensed to the world’s leading motherboard companies for integration onto their upcoming motherboards featuring AMD’s 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets. Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI are among the first motherboard manufacturers to offer this new capability, with more coming on board shortly," NVIDIA said in a blog post.
While NVIDIA may not be too keen on enabling a competitor in the GPU market, the move makes a ton of sense. If NVIDIA believes that Bulldozer really will be a viable Intel competitor for gamers, then why wouldn't they want to expand the market for its GPUs to include Bulldozer customers?
It's also the case that Intel is not sitting still on the GPU front. Despite Larrabee's cancellation, Sandy Bridge's integrated processor graphics (IPG) make some low-end discrete GPUs redundant, and the fully modern Ivy Bridge IPG (Sandy Bridge's successor) will probably take a bite out of the mid-range market for discrete GPUs. Any way you slice it, both NVIDIA and AMD are likely to lose progressively more discrete GPU sales to Intel's IPGs in the coming year, so NVIDIA needs to do all it can to ensure that as many customers as possible can have access to as much of its discrete GPU hardware as possible. And that means enabling SLI on AMD platforms.
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