Wednesday 19th September 2007

IDF: Dual CPU Quad SLI motherboard revealed

Posted at: 7:34am 19th September 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Two processors and four graphics cards - what more could you want, apart from a new PSU?

Intel unveiled a 'Skull Trail' board at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) today, which not only had two processor sockets, but also had four PCI-E graphics slots.

Steve Smith, Intel's vice president and director of digital enterprise operations, showed off the board as a part of his presentation on Intel's new 45nm processors. Smith said that the board already runs with 'dual configuration SLI,' and also said that we can 'expect support for up to four [graphics cards in SLI, we assume] in the future.'

Although this dual-processor board is clearly aimed at the workstation market, it will also appeal to enthusiasts who could potentially fill it with two quad-core processors and perhaps four graphics cards. This statement also reveals that Nvidia could potentially be reviving Quad SLI, as well as providing support for SLI on non-Nvidia chipsets,

Smith said that he expected the board to launch by the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

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Maybe these are just doing this so they can get our money? Marketing strategies ? Ok wheres my intel and nvidia application form for chief executive :D Btw, i think its getting a bit old having to fork out for these all the time, whatever happened to the intergrated GPU/CPU we heard of awhile back.....? Now that would be better ! One block instead of 20 with numerous cables, a power station and turbine outside your house, and your next door neighbour who has a better computer than you also has a small nuke power station just to top off the jealousy :D

Comment by Lightning_Pete at 11:04pm 25th September 2007

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It's probably for DX10...

Looks like we're going to need FOUR £500 graphics cards and TWO £800 processors to get a playable frame rate in a DX10 game then. What happened to having ONE graphics card and ONE cpu that whe nyou upgraded to lasted more than 10 minutes....

Comment by PingmanGT4 at 11:18am 24th September 2007

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Intelference ?

@james_x_1: in short: signal interference. Cutting down on card slots results in shorter lines for the communication bus so the normal ways of signal shielding will still give you the full performance from the connected cards.

Comment by GeroldM at 11:40pm 22nd September 2007

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Intelference ?

Comment by GeroldM at 11:40pm 22nd September 2007

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Poor design

So, where do I put my: High-end sound card Gigabit-speed network card Drive-controller card (full-tower case with 12 drive-slots) Temperature-monitor card Why do motherboard makers keep reducing the number of card-slots? Surely, with all the hardware, software, and firmware tech' out there, they can give us more slots? If they keep going down this road, there wont be any slots left for our high-end kit. That will spell the end for the PC Games Industry, unless someone finds a new way to interface, maybe use Firewire, or USB 3 ??