Beyond the two millionth SLI

An NVIDIA employee announced a few days ago that the two millionth SLI-capable NVIDIA chipset has also sold out, which is a great success for the company.

Since the release of the original nForce4 SLI in 2004, more than two million such chipsets and more than six million GeForce series graphics controllers have left production lines. Thus, the top-of-the-line SLI-capable nForce4s account for about 20-25 percent of the company’s total chipset flooding, meaning it’s easy to calculate that lower-end solutions will also sell out pretty nicely.

According to NVIDIA, they have managed to achieve a 90 percent share of the market for chipsets without graphics cores for AMD processors, which is quite credible given the very weak competition. Currently, 45 percent of AMD-based systems are equipped with a chipset with a built-in graphics core, and because the company does not supply a video-controlled northern bridge at all for eighth-generation solutions, at least this segment could benefit SiS, VIA and ATI.

So it is clear that while NVIDIA is soaring for discrete solutions, the lack of integrated graphics core versions still significantly limits their capabilities, it is no coincidence that they are working on a collapsible solution that can be completed in a matter of seconds. In the second quarter of 2005, NVIDIA dominated 35 percent of AMD systems, down 20 percent from a quarter earlier. In contrast, ATI struggled to rise from nearly zero to 27 percent over the same period, while the remaining 38 percent remained in the hands of VIA and SiS.

Going back to the success of SLI-capable solutions, with a little headache, we can conclude that virtually every tenth AMD system is sold as a multi-GPU-capable computer.