Intel, others license SLI technology for P55-based motherboards

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Matthew DeCarlo

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Nvidia has announced that several top manufacturers have licensed SLI technology for use on their Intel P55 chipset-packing motherboards. The boards are designed for the upcoming LGA 1156-based Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs codenamed "Lynnfield." Among the companies are Asus, EVGA, Intel, Gigabyte, and MSI. As such, those who buy a P55-based motherboard and a new Core i5 or i7 CPU will be able to furnish their PC with any combination of Nvidia GeForce video cards - including Quad SLI.

With the addition of the latest Core i7 and i5, SLI is now obtainable on all consumer PC platforms, including the Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo as well as AMD's Phenom II. An Intel exec said that SLI is the perfect complement to their future CPU and system board offerings. The Lynnfield line and corresponding motherboards are expected to debut in the third quarter of this year, probably next month.

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I haven't seen anything as official as this announcement but I'm pretty sure Asus, ECS and EVGA (probably others) have shown P55 boards with CrossfireX support.
 
Great news although I don't see immediate advantage since P55 has only 16 PCIe lanes.
Thus in SLI you can have no more than 2x8 lanes, which I guess it is not goed enough for higher end cards...
 
That is PCI-E 2.0, which means two PCI-E 2.0 x8 slots have the same bandwidth as two PCI-E 1.1 x16 slots.

The x16 SLI is a marketing ploy from the nForce4 days; there is no noticeable difference from using it over x8 SLI, since there is no card I know of that can completely saturate the PCI-E 1.1 x16 bus, let alone PCI-E 2.0 x16.
 
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