Intel X58 chipset to support SLI and CrossFire

Posted at: 2:00pm 14th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

New chipset will feature Nvidia’s nForce 200 chip, allowing support for 3-way and 2-way SLI, as well as CrossFire support via the Intel chipset

After denying Intel the use of its SLI technology in all but its top-end Tumwater and Skulltrail chipsets, Nvidia has finally given in and allowed Intel to make its nForce 200 chip a part of Intel’s forthcoming X58 ‘Tylersburg’ chipset for Nehalem CPUs.

As such, this will make X58 the first mainstream desktop chipset that supports both SLI and CrossFire. Not only that, but the nForce 200 chip is a part of Nvidia’s latest nForce 7-series of chipsets, which can support 3-way SLI, as opposed to the older, 2-way SLI nForce 100 chip found on current Skulltrail motherboards. Nvidia explained to Custom PC that this wasn’t a licensing deal with Intel, but that motherboard manufacturers would be directly purchasing the nForce 200 MCPs from Nvidia. It’s an interesting move from Nvidia, who has so far only offered SLI support on its own nForce SLI chipsets in the mainstream motherboard market.

Intel hasn’t revealed a lot of official details about Tylersburg yet, but a leaked slide on the Internet reveal that it has over 32 PCI-E lanes, which can support two PCI-E 2.0 graphics cards with 16 lanes each, or four cards with eight lanes each. This seems highly likely, given the inclusion of the nForce 200 chip. Meanwhile, another leaked slide suggests that the X58 chipset will be completed by an ICH10 Southbridge.

Either way, the new chipset marks a big departure from Intel’s previous chipsets, as Nehalem CPUs will feature an integrated triple-channel DDR3 memory controller, meaning that the chipset no longer needs to control the memory. Nehalem (codenamed Bloomfield) CPUs will also feature modular components connected by QuickPath interconnects, and Intel plans to span the architecture over several of its product lines, including both single and dual-CPU configurations.

In fact, the Tylersburg chipset will also span across single and dual-processor motherboards, and with two Nehalem CPUs you’ll be able to control a further three channels of memory. Nehalem will also add support for SSE 4.2, and Intel’s Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) technology, which, like Intel’s previous Hyper-Threading technology, allows you to execute two threads on one core at the same time. Intel also says that the Nehalem architecture will be scalable from two to eight cores in a single package.

Would you be interested in buying a standard desktop motherboard with support for both SLI and CrossFire? Let us know your thoughts.