Intel demos "unreleased" Nvidia chips

RUMOUR HAS IT that Intel has been showing off 'unreleased' Nvidia graphics cards running PCI Express 2.0 on its Stoakley chipset over at the PCI SIG developer's conference this week.

Held in San Jose, it's a meeting of the leading forces in the PCI-E standard, who are hoping to push out consumer-grade PCI-E-2 products before Christmas. Intel has committed to putting it in a motherboard before the year is out.

According to reports, Intel "demonstrated unreleased AMD and Nvidia graphics chips riding its Stoakley chip set for workstations". Anybody got an info on what these cards were, and what Intel was doing with DAAMIT cards in its machines? Sounds awful juicy to us, but alas, we are far away from sunny San Jose, and we don't even really know the way.

PCI-E-2 provides more bandwidth, up to 5G transfers/second in the spec. That's double the 1.1 spec of 2.5 G transfers/second, and is achieved by tightening impedance and jitter tolerances.

Will DX11 cards require PCI-E-2? We think not, but you never know - the merciless switch to AGP taught us that graphics companies are happy to dump interconnects in a heartbeat. µ