Posted on Sunday, August 31 2008 @ 22:56 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA revealed to
Bit Tech that they have a QPI license from Intel - this allows them to make chipsets for the Intel Bloomfield processor but the chip maker says they won't release a QPI-based chipset at this time. NVIDIA is currently focusing its attention to DMI chipsets for Intel's mainstream Lynnfield and Havendale processors.
>i>Petersen was adamant that Nvidia’s cross-licensing agreement with Intel includes a Quick Path Interface licence, enabling the company to develop chipsets for Intel’s latest processors.
“We chose to focus our engineering resources on developing DMI chipsets [for mainstream Lynnfield and Havendale processors] at this time,” explained Petersen. He then added that just because Nvidia isn’t releasing a QPI-based chipset initially, it doesn’t mean there won’t be QPI-based chipsets in the future.
Unlike Bloomfield, both Lynnfield and Havendale use the DMI chipset interconnect instead of the faster QPI; however, with both the memory controller and PCI-Express now on the CPU it’s questionable what Nvidia can bring to the table. Of course, it can enable things like SLI Memory through the BIOS, but then so can any other BIOS developer - what we hope to see is boards that support both SLI Memory and XMP (Intel's version of the technology).
