Whoop-ass turns to grovelingNV Watch X58 gets SLI, Jen-Hsun gets egg on faceBy Charlie Demerjian: Monday, 14 July 2008, 3:50 PMClick here to find out more!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?The most interesting part is how Nvidia backpedaled. As soon as they mouthed off about whoop-ass and all that, they tanked. Now Nvidia is sheepishily begging Intel for some Nehalem loving, but knocking on the back door hoping no one is looking, cap in hand. They don't have the technology to do a real chipset for CSI, so they are spinning their way around it.At the press conference later today, they will have a love-in without any technical details as usual, telling how great their tech is without answering any hard questions. A quick poll of OEMs shows the count of X58 boards with the n200 at 0, a number backed up by the Computex count, with plans for board vendors to build them also at 0 +/- 0. If this is the huge win, why is no one making them? The first round of boards won't have SLI at this rate, so Christmas is pretty much a loss for NV.If you are on the call, ask for specific models of boards that are supposedly coming, then check with the manufacturers as to when those projects were started. This isn't an announcement, it is a backpedaling and (whoopped) ass-covering session.In the Jen-Hsun vs Intel whoop-ass battle, we sure know who wears the jodhpurs in the relationship. And they aren't green.
