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Vincent Lee, Intel’s Regional Sales Manager of South China, is reported to have said that Nvidia had authorized Intel 945GM and 945PM chipsets to support the company’s SLI technology. Chinese web-site HKEPC claims that due to impossibility to reprogram PCI Express lanes available in mobile versions of Intel 945-series chipsets, PCI Express lanes from Intel’s I/O controllers have to be used to plug-in second graphics processor. It is also reported that such PCI Express x16 + PCI Express x4 configuration is already supported by Nvidia ForceWare 91.31 drives.
It is not a secret that support of multi-GPU technologies, such as ATI’s CrossFire and Nvidia’s SLI, by various chipsets is mainly associated with reprogrammable PCI Express lanes, available in several core-logic devices, including Intel’s premier 955X and 975X, as well as support from the drivers. So far Nvidia did not allow any chipsets, but its own, to work with two of its GeForce GPUs in SLI mode. However, given that Nvidia does not have a mobile chipset for Intel chips, meanwhile Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors win benchmarks against Athlon 64 or Turion 64 processors, the company is forced to support even extraordinary chipsets from Intel, as it wants to have an ability to participate in the market space of ultra high performance mobile computers for gaming.
So far SLI technology for mobile computers was only available on systems running AMD Athlon 64 or AMD Turion 64 microprocessors, as they are more popular among gamers than chips like Intel Pentium D or Intel Core Duo. But with the Core 2 Duo the situation may change.
Usually notebooks with two graphics cards come with large displays and desktop-class hard disk drives, which may them too hard to carry, as they may weigh up to 7 kilograms or sometimes more.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to en enquiry seeking for comments.
