Questions for Nvidia.

[navecko]

How long until we see four gpus on a single pcb? Why can't you just put two on the same slice?

The fastest single-core 90nm AMD cpu did 3.0 stock. Their fastest 90nm dual-core cpu did 2.8 stock. Is it reasonable to infer that two gpus could be put on the same slice and run nearly as fast as if they each had their own slice?

Or better yet why not just double all the pipes and shaders and interconnecting stuff. Wouldn't that lead to a die twice the size allowing for twice as much heat transfer while avioding the SLI performance tax (~15±)?

Is everything titrated by the marketing dept?

 

[TuxDave]

I'm not sure what you're talking about when you are referring to 'slice' but doubling the size of a die will lead to a much much much more expensive die. I would rather pay for two of them than one that's double the size.

 

[imported_Rat]

Didn't the Voodoo 5 6000 or whatever have 4 GPUs on one card? That was a popular toy. I'd prefer that they utilized clever engineering rather than just shoehorning another chip onto that fragile piece of fibreglass.

 

[imported_inspire]

Doesn't the X1900X have double the pipelines of the 7900 GT ? And the performance gain isn't that spectacular (And yes, I know I'm comparing apples and oranges in a way...) I don't know a whole lot about it, but from what I can gather, with the current generation of GPUs, performance doesn't scale that efficiently by simply adding more pipelines.

 

[Genx87]

It makes more sense from a manufacturing point of view to keep the dies seperate and combine them post fabbing on the PCB. My guess the reason we havent seen 4 on a single PCB is heat and power consumption.

 

[navecko]

A good point was made regarding cost. It must be that increasing the ammount of sillicon per chip causes an exponential decrease in stability due to impurities/imperfections. If there are more chips per wafer there can be greater disparity when they are binned. Thats why AMD's 90nm dualcore chips were more expensive than Intel's 90nm ones.

 

[Tengu13]

Originally posted by: Rat
Didn't the Voodoo 5 6000 or whatever have 4 GPUs on one card? That was a popular toy. I'd prefer that they utilized clever engineering rather than just shoehorning another chip onto that fragile piece of fibreglass.

I remember that card, I had one. It was 4 GPU's on one card, but it was gigantic. Not to mention had no support for newer games because at the time, SLI wasn't very popular and OpenGL on Voodoo's sucked because it was emulated through their proprietary Glide engine. Never the less, I loved that card. I'm kinda sad I sold it and bought a cheaper Radeon that performed better. I thought I'd never see SLI again after Voodoo died... but low and behold! I guess the aquisition of 3dfx by nVidia has revived old dinosaurs.

 

[Valrandir]

Are you sure that you had one Tengu13?
There was like only 4 such card manufactured, they never made it to production.
Maybe you mean a Voodoo 5500 with two CPU?

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: Valrandir
Are you sure that you had one Tengu13?
There was like only 4 such card manufactured, they never made it to production.
Maybe you mean a Voodoo 5500 with two CPU?

Hes definately talking about the voodoo 5 5500 64mb AGP, the 6000 is so rare that there are only a small amount (less that 10 id guess) that were produced

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: Tengu13

Originally posted by: Rat
Didn't the Voodoo 5 6000 or whatever have 4 GPUs on one card? That was a popular toy. I'd prefer that they utilized clever engineering rather than just shoehorning another chip onto that fragile piece of fibreglass.

I remember that card, I had one. It was 4 GPU's on one card, but it was gigantic. Not to mention had no support for newer games because at the time, SLI wasn't very popular and OpenGL on Voodoo's sucked because it was emulated through their proprietary Glide engine. Never the less, I loved that card. I'm kinda sad I sold it and bought a cheaper Radeon that performed better. I thought I'd never see SLI again after Voodoo died... but low and behold! I guess the aquisition of 3dfx by nVidia has revived old dinosaurs.

OpenGL rocked on those cards as did glide

 

[fire400]

OpenGL versus DirectX

which one has more support?

OpenGL is a dying technology.