Monday, December 15th 2008
NVIDIA's Atom Chipset Supports SLI
Picture this: a nettop/netbook/ULPC chipset that supports a gamer-grade feature such as NVIDIA SLI. Well, that's about become a reality with a certain variant of the MCP7A chipset NVIDIA is preparing for the Intel Atom processor. VR-Zone has learned that the chipset would offer all features essential to platforms it caters to, plus offering integrated GeForce graphics and supporting external graphics, including support for 2-way NVIDIA SLI. The root complex would connect to two discrete graphics devices with 8 PCI-Express lanes each.
The 'essential' features this chipset brings to the table include support for PC2-6400 memory standard (up to four DIMM slots), six SATA II channels, twelve USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and IEEE 1394 and HD Audio. There is yet another chipset in the pipeline, the MCP79 for pico-ATX and SFF platforms, which supports a single DDR3 memory channel, integrated GeForce graphics with DVI-D and HDMI support.
Source:
VR-Zone
The 'essential' features this chipset brings to the table include support for PC2-6400 memory standard (up to four DIMM slots), six SATA II channels, twelve USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and IEEE 1394 and HD Audio. There is yet another chipset in the pipeline, the MCP79 for pico-ATX and SFF platforms, which supports a single DDR3 memory channel, integrated GeForce graphics with DVI-D and HDMI support.
19 Comments on NVIDIA's Atom Chipset Supports SLI
The SLI feature is really more of a "hey look what we can do" move, Nvidia offers SLI support in some form with almost all of their chipsets today, so really you can think of it as just another bullet point for advertising departments to put on the box. The fact that the platform includes an IGP shows that Nvidia understands the market for these items demand higher performance, better features, and lower power than what Intel offers with its 945 series chipsets. The Atom processor itself is a very capable little chip and paired with a decent IGP will easily handle the settings any games could be played at, using the IGP alone.
On the desktop side of things, its also a good move as you get native support for 6x SATA II ports and GBE, making for a perfect NAS or DIY storage server platform. Existing Atom boards with GBE, like the D945GCLF2 are a good base but you still only get 2x SATA ports and 1x IDE port, so you really dont get much room to reach storage goals to take advantage of cheap drives. Odds are this new chipset will support the typical raid 0/1/0+1/5 that nvidia has standard on many chipsets so they would be giving much needed features to the data dump crowd. Ive been using VIA C7 based mini itx in one of my servers, and love that I can get a 2tb box with minimal foot print, power consumption, and still get the performance I need. As the Atom really destroys the C7, I find this new platform worth my eye at least.
a dual core Atom N330 would probably do OK with 2 budget cards in Sli, im talking really budget.
like 8600GT's...........9500GT's.........something really low power.
1./ Especially if you can implement ASYMMETRIC SLI then you have a lot of options.
2./ For cooling and heat issues, you could stick each of the GPU's at opposite ends of the laptop case.
3./ Atom 270 (single) 330 (dual) and quad atoms and larrabee? I wonder where this is going
The fact that Intel is working so closely with nVidia on these funky ideas is interesting. In theory you could ditch SSE on Atom, and do it on the GPU, not CUDA, but with CPU extensions just like x387 used to so the math. High latency, but very fast. The days of parasite computing are back!
then cuda would be a good move if they speed up productivity on these laptops ;-)