Intel and Nvidia to work together on Nehalem

GPU maker Nvidia has been in the press a lot lately, for its tight-lippedness on the failure rates of its 8-series mobile GPUs, its dire competition with AMD/ATI, and its new Rambus patent litigation. Today, however, brought some good news.

Intel announced today that the upcoming single-socket desktop Nehalem CPU platform known as Bloomfield will be getting Nvidia's SLI technology, despite an article in the The Wall Street Journal this morning, saying that Intel and Nvidia were still "squabbling over terms of a 2003 licensing agreement" that could have blocked Nehalem chips from having SLI.

Scalable Link Interface (SLI) is Nvidia's trademarked multi-GPU architecture that allows chaining video cards together to share the graphics processing workload. Intel's announcement today coincidentally highlights the GeForce GTX 260 and 280 GPUs, Nvidia's four-week-old graphics cards that just significantly dropped in price.

Last night, Nvidia announced that the GTX 260 would go from $399 to $299, and the higher-end GTX 280 would go from $649 to $499, bringing them closer in price to their competitors from ATI.

The company claims graphics performance is 2.8 times faster than a single graphics card system, when using the nForce 200 SLI MCP with Intel's Bloomfield CPU and Tylersburg core logic chipset, even with a resolution of 2500 x 1600 with all the "eye candy" turned on.