NVIDIA to introduce Hybrid SLI technology by year end
Wednesday 27th June 2007, 10:10:00 PM, written by Farid
According to an official letter NVIDIA sent to its OEM partners, the Santa Clara GPU maker plans to release a new variant of its SLI technology meant to leverage the presence of a NVIDIA IGP in a PC. DigiTimes translates the claims made by some OEM to HKEPC, which intercepted this letter (available in English here), and reports more on the features of this new type of GPU associations.
This new technology, said to be the “core PC ecosystem strategy for the coming year†for NVIDIA, will turn off discrete GPUs, without any reboot required, and let the IGP handle the load when the user run GPU light applications on his desktop such as browsing the web, using text editors and watching movies, thus saving a lot of energy and reducing the noise produced significantly. This holds especially true for dual high-end discrete cards owners, where two 8800GTX can be quite a strain on the power source.
On the other hand, when a game or any other graphic heavy application is started, the Hybrid SLI kick start the discrete GPUs and give the system all the graphical horsepower it needs.
The Hybrid SLI solution will also be made available to laptops where it will serve mainly as a battery energy saving technology, doing what it does on the desktop, turning off the discrete GPU when not needed and switching to the IGP in the meantime. And when requested, the GPU enters the scene, helped by the IGP as well.
At publishing time, it’s still unclear whether this technology could be made available to existing boards or if it requires new chipsets. In any cases, if implemented transparently, Hybrid SLI should please, by the end of this year, all the (future) NVIDIA powered motherboard plus graphics card owners.
This new technology, said to be the “core PC ecosystem strategy for the coming year†for NVIDIA, will turn off discrete GPUs, without any reboot required, and let the IGP handle the load when the user run GPU light applications on his desktop such as browsing the web, using text editors and watching movies, thus saving a lot of energy and reducing the noise produced significantly. This holds especially true for dual high-end discrete cards owners, where two 8800GTX can be quite a strain on the power source.
On the other hand, when a game or any other graphic heavy application is started, the Hybrid SLI kick start the discrete GPUs and give the system all the graphical horsepower it needs.
The Hybrid SLI solution will also be made available to laptops where it will serve mainly as a battery energy saving technology, doing what it does on the desktop, turning off the discrete GPU when not needed and switching to the IGP in the meantime. And when requested, the GPU enters the scene, helped by the IGP as well.
At publishing time, it’s still unclear whether this technology could be made available to existing boards or if it requires new chipsets. In any cases, if implemented transparently, Hybrid SLI should please, by the end of this year, all the (future) NVIDIA powered motherboard plus graphics card owners.
Tagging
nvidia ± hybrid, sli
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