Quad SLi - where will it stop???

ShiverinEskimo

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_28569.html

nVidia.com wrote:

NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) took its acclaimed SLI technology to a new level today by introducing support for the industry's first ever Quad SLI-certified PC. Delivering the most extreme high definition gaming experience available on the PC, Quad SLI features four of NVIDIA's flagship GeForce® 7800 GTX GPUs with an NVIDIA nForce®4 SLI X16 motherboard. This revolutionary technology was introduced today on the forthcoming Dell XPS 600 Renegade, as part of a keynote presentation by Michael Dell at CES in Las Vegas, NV....

....NVIDIA Quad SLI technology allows consumers to:

* Run today's hottest games at extreme high definition (HD) resolutions-including an unbelievable 2560x1600 -- at silky smooth frame rates
* Crank up their image quality with 32x antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering
* Maximize their shader and texture settings for a truly immersive gaming experience....

Seriously - is this to become the norm in a few years...

Balfa

No, it won't. Paying e2000 for your PC's graphics subsystem will never become the norm.

And as fabrication processes become better, they'll be able to use smaller and smaller dies and fit more dies on one card for much neater parallel graphics processor, the way the 3dfx Voodoos 4 & 5 did.

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/index.xml
The UltraSPARC-T1 has 8 cores giving 32 simultaneous processing threads per chip.

Stephen

Well at least now those muppets who went out and bought 1kW power supplies have something to use them with

Capt'n Midnight

Stephen wrote:

Well at least now those muppets who went out and bought 1kW power supplies have something to use them with

The UltraSPARC-T1 only uses 72 Watts

K.O.Kiki

I just saw a CES report (can't remember where - HardOCP should have a link) which stated very simply:

• Quad-SLI will probably remain Dell-exclusive
• The power requirements are 150W per card! To this end, 2 of the four GPU's use external powerbricks designed for laptops...
• A Quad-SLI PC costs upwards of $7000...

Seriously though, I saw people complaining the heat output would stop them from overclocking o.O

riptide

Stephen wrote:

Well at least now those muppets who went out and bought 1kW power supplies have something to use them with

GLINE won't like that one he he he

Balfa

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/index.xml
The UltraSPARC-T1 has 8 cores giving 32 simultaneous processing threads per chip.

It's also completely off topic...

DonkeyRhubarb

If one top end card can run anything silky smooth, whats the point in running games at more frames than the eye can see??? buy one top end card now, then get the next top end card when it comes out, instead of buying bloody FOUR of them now. Madness I tell ya, MADNESS!!!!

K.O.Kiki

And yet people will still pay for it...
well, maybe not. More probably, hardcore overclockers will complain that they can't build the PC themselves And, as I already found out, complain that they can't overclock(???)

Laguna

Well I most certainly won't ever buy into this quad SLI madness, when will they draw the line for christs sake? - who has the kind of money to throw around on a graphics system for their PC that on it's own will cost at least €1500+?. I'm sticking with ATI for the forseeable future, admittedly Crossfire is a mess but I'm hoping ATI pull their finger out and create a technology to rival SLI..

Capt'n Midnight

Balfa wrote:

It's also completely off topic...

You mean graphics processing ISN'T massively parallel and benefits from large bandwidth and wide buses ?

IIRC Sun were the one of the first with "Multiply A by B and Add C" on a block of data as a single instruction.

Shouldn't be too difficult to widen the bus further.. The fact they can scale to QUAD means its possible to scale further. BTW: didn't the connections machine have 32768 or 65536 processors ?

conzy

If they spent more time at the drawing board desinging better, faster, more efficient GPUs rather than playing one-up-manship, We would have better and cheaper graphics cards,

Instead of using 4 power guzzling GPUs, why not use 1:rolleyes:

riptide

conzymaher wrote:

If they spent more time at the drawing board desinging better, faster, more efficient GPUs rather than playing one-up-manship, We would have better and cheaper graphics cards,

Instead of using 4 power guzzling GPUs, why not use 1:rolleyes:

I've aseen a pic of the mobo and the cards somewhere... it looks ridiculus... 4 massive cards dwarfing the MOBO... I wonder how much time and resources did it take to come up with that idea and put it into practice... like you said... same resources into designing better GPU's / mem might be an idea!

riptide

conzymaher wrote:

If they spent more time at the drawing board desinging better, faster, more efficient GPUs rather than playing one-up-manship, We would have better and cheaper graphics cards,

Instead of using 4 power guzzling GPUs, why not use 1:rolleyes:

I've aseen a pic of the mobo and the cards somewhere... it looks ridiculus... 4 massive cards dwarfing the MOBO... I wonder how much time and resources did it take to come up with that idea and put it into practice... like you said... same resources into designing better GPU's / mem might be an idea!

JimmyL

PCs are entering the consumer space which means companies need to bring out extremely outrageous marketing products to attract buyers (like with cars!).

I wonder what soundcard manufacturers will do? Anyone for 16.4 sound!

gline

riptide wrote:

GLINE won't like that one he he he

LOL,

yay now my 1kw psu will have a use

WexCan

Pic: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28839

Mutant_Fruit

JimmyL wrote:

I wonder what soundcard manufacturers will do? Anyone for 16.4 sound!

Nah, who in their right mind would want 16.4 sound! Thats rediculous!

Clicky me

riptide

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

Nah, who in their right mind would want 16.4 sound! Thats rediculous!

Clicky me

Most of us only have 2 ears anyways!!!:)

K.O.Kiki

You know, it's a moot point and all but there's been Quad-graphics capability on the sexy G5's for a bit. Just something I remembered.

riptide

K.O.Kiki wrote:

You know, it's a moot point and all but there's been Quad-graphics capability on the sexy G5's for a bit. Just something I remembered.

And the performance is marginal at best