With all of the back and forth disputes between Intel and NVIDIA, you'd be forgiven for thinking that their relationship was getting a bit strained. It looks like both have managed to put their differences aside, though, for a pair of announcements relating to the upcoming Sandy Bridge CPUs.
Firstly, Reuters reports that NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has been telling reporters that GeForce graphics chips will feature in more than 200 Sandy Bridge notebooks next year. This is a significant improvement over the 125 design wins that the company managed to rack up in 2010 and might help it to achieve the CEO's goal of increasing NVIDIA's notebook market share.
This is only really significant because of the drastic improvements the Intel has made to its integrated GPUs. There has been some concern that the new CPUs would have a major impact on the notebook market by delivering the same performance as current low-to-mid range discrete GPUs without the need for extra power-hungry silicon. However, this clearly shows that OEMs are still interested in discrete GPUs across their whole product lines, not just the mid-to-high end.
Secondly, the GPU-maker has announced - to coincide with the launch of the GeForce GTX 570, we assume - that a number of major motherboard manufacturers will be supporting SLI on their upcoming P67 motherboards. Multi-GPU support on Sandy Bridge boards was never really in doubt, but considering the uncertainty at the time of the Nehalem launch, it's reassuring to know that Intel's high-end platforms will be capable of supporting the technology on day one.
