We had the opportunity to join a conference call with Ujesh Desai, NVIDIA's General Manager for GPU where he updated us on NVIDIA's future developments in 2006. Join us and see what NVIDIA has in store for us this year! Link : NVIDIA Jan'06 Updates!
Are you able to elaborate at all upon Quad SLI - when we might expect to see the cards out, who has plans to make them (eVGA hopefully), etc..?
Umm.. As stated in the article, Quad SLI will be out in spring. Nope, NVIDIA did not tell us who has signed up to make them, but I wouldn't be surprised if Dell starts selling them in addition to packaging as part of the XPS 600 Renegade.
Hehe, sorry if I didn't phrase it very well - I meant anything more specific than 'spring' - spring can encompass anywhere between february to may, it's as ambiguous as if nVidia were to say it'll be released in Q2 2006... Do you know if the drivers released (I believe it's Forceware 85.xx or 90.xx which will support quad setups) will cover using the Asus 7800GT Dual in a quad setup? That was my plan but at the moment the card doesn't work properly in the primary PCIe slot of an SLIx16 mobo (only 1 GPU is shown - as if the drivers don't realise that SLI could exist without the secondary PCIe slot being used), have tested in both Asus' and MSI's SLIx16 mobos. Not sure whether nVidia would support such a setup... Lastly, I heard a rumour that Quad GTX 512 was indeed a gimmick and it'll actually be the G71 series that's released in Quad setup. Would that be wide of the mark...? Or would discussion of this breach an NDA? :-/
NVIDIA intentionally kept it ambiguous. I think they wouldn't want to announce something tentatively only to push the release date back later, which wouldn't look good at all. But a period of Feb to May isn't that bad. At least they are pegging it to a 3-4 month period. If I were to guess, I would say it will debut around April. NVIDIA did say (in an earlier interview) that driver compatibility is something they take very seriously, especially when it came to SLI. But beyond that, I cannot confirm anything. As far as we are aware, NVIDIA informed us that the Quad GTX 512MB setup you saw at CES 2006 will be, more or less, the same thing released to retail stores.
That's only if you stick to the northern hemisphere. In the south it's spring in october-november... maybe that's what nVidia was referring to. /Olle
Hehe.. They were running the teleconference from Santa Clara, California. So, I expect them to be talking about the northern hemisphere.
