It looks that in the end, Nvidia will end up with a Nehalem chipset, but not the one that supports high end Bloomfield CPUs.
Nvidia’s Director of chipset marketing Tom Peterson said
many times during his presentation and our meeting that Nvidia is focusing on
DMI chipsets for Intel and that there are some projects that they work on.
After we asked around it looks that both Lynfield and Heavendale,
mainstream and entry level Nehalem generation dual and quad core CPUs are using
DMI and this is something Nvidia can make.
At this point it is still cloudy if Nvidia will ever get a
green light to make its QPI chipset for Bloomfield Core i7 CPUs but even if it
doesn’t we can only hope that such product would come before middle 2009. The
giving away of software SLI through licensees is a good step forward and this
might soften Intel’s hearth.