Nvidia Releases World's first Quad GPU - 9800GTX (QG98) [Tri SLI Already Obsolete]

[sawman3]

Im pretty sure there's an issue of throughput there which necessitates SLI in the firstplace...

The whole point of having a multi core cpu at this point is that we've reached a sufficient system bus width to permit that without excessive bottlenecking but we're talking about communication via a PCIx16 bus- once you hit the bandwidth limitation of that bus you can have 89 GPUs on your card and it won't matter. You have to GET to the data to process it.

They're working on a new PCI specification because of this.

Then again I doubt we will be seeing multi-core GPU's for a good while. Thus the need for the new PCI spec is a little unclear ATM. This is just a pattern that bugs me: continuous development when the current product or feature hasn't even been yet used to its full potential. But whatever. Down the hatch, I guess.

 

[Cheffster]

Well, its pretty obivous that the GPU market will be heading towards multi-core GPU's as like the CPU market, eventually. ATI's next the R700 supposedly is going to be a multi-core GPU http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-039-s-New-R700-Family-May-Feature-Multiple-Die-GPUs-73184.shtml, and likely Nvidia's G100 chipset will be multi-core as well.

I don't think there's any reason for them to have considered making multi-core's yet when they've been able to consistenly make faster single-core chips. CPU's headed towards muli-core processing simply becuase it was best way of making new chips faster. I'm sure if GPU manufactur's spent all their R&D on developing dual/quad core GPU's they could -- but why do that when you can get the same or better performance with 1 GPU?
(would u rather have 4x Gefore6800's on a single chip? or simply 1 8800 that gives the same performance? )

I'm also 100% posivitive both ATI and NVidia have been comtemplating this for a while.