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Post Briefing Notes and Analysis

Post briefing I had an opportunity to fire a few questions off to Brian Burke. Highlights of our email exchange

-There is wasted memory with framebuffer information being duplicated.
- SLI is focused on a multiboard solution currently. When asked about a single board product we got a "no comment about unannounced products" reply ;)
- MIO is a highspeed digital interface. A variety of data can be transmitted using scalability connector. - SLI is PCIe only. 6800 Ultra, GTs, FX3400s will support SLI
- 4 video outputs possible on desktop with two boards. Single output only with SLI in 3D - From here forward, SLI will be offered on future midrange and high end products
- No current plans to scale beyond two cards currently

Because I do not get to start up rumor mill type stuff, I'm going to jump all over this opportunity and make some educated guesses from the answers I have. There will be a single board, dual GPU solution. I am not sure about the timeframe but I think it will be dependent on Nvidia's competitors - let me explain. There are no plans to scale beyond two cards but with a single board SLI solution there can be a combination of two dual GPU cards giving Nvidia a near 4-fold jump in the performance arena market. Remember 3dfx attempted this with the ill-fated Voodoo 5 - 6000. Is this the ideal solution for cranking out insane performance numbers? No. But there will also be other markets that will be interested for this say for military simulations that require ultra high resolution video units.

The cryptic answer about MIO is more curious. With Nvidia's aggressive posturing in the video editing market it would not be too farfetched to speculate that this will have video related implications. A direct, high bandwidth bus directly to the GPU has interesting ramifications. I'm not a video editing expert by any means so I'll let someone else dream up uses for this but it looks like there will be other applications other than SLI.

Conclusion

Nvidia is upping the ante significantly with SLI. The performance crown in the current generation of products is muddy at best but with SLI there leaves little doubt as to who will hold the bragging rights of fastest video solution. The summary of follow up questions to Brian Burke omitted one of my concerns - one of the problems that faced 3dfx was the incredible expectations that followed after the 3dfx-SLI Voodoo2. The Voodoo3 provided little in terms of a performance increase and left a lot of enthusiasts jaded so it will be important for Nvidia to actually keep up with SLI in the future so relative performance will increase.

There will also be some pressure on Nvidia's partners who are selling expensive enthusiast Ultra cards. With a relatively inexpensive (comparatively) dual GT solution, there will be nearly 50% more performance for roughly the same price. The biggest question is will ATI have anything to counter this unexpected curveball from Nvidia or will they have to rely on Alienware as a 3rd party solution? I cannot imagine that SLI was a whim developed in a short time and if ATI did not foresee this coming they could possibly be looking up a big hill to climb before catching up to Nvidia in terms of raw speed. The landscape of 3D graphics has once again been changed significantly today. We will see what to make of today's news in a couple years.