Nvidia has told Fudzilla that Intel won’t let Nvidia make its Nforce chipset that will work with Intel’s Nehalem generation of processors. This has been confirmed from Intel’s side as well. This is definitely bad news for gamers and computer enthusiasts.

This is big news in the computer hardware industry because if Intel really doesn’t let Nvidia make its chipset work with Nehalem, that means there will be no SLI support with Nehalem. This will force system builders that want the latest and highest performance hardware to choose between using Nehalem for top of the line processor performance, or SLI for top of the line video and graphics performance.

People who will want dual, triple, or quad graphics cards from Nvidia will be forced to use an AMD processor with their next generation system build. This will mean lower sales on the high end to computer enthusiasts from Intel. At this point Intel and Nvidia should be working together to keep AMD and ATI from gaining back some market share.

If Intel keeps this up, we may very well see many people going with AMD processors or with ATI graphics cards. This move by Intel will hurt both companies.

Intel is doing this because they see how Nvidia’s graphics cards can be used in supercomputer applications. They might lose a lot of money if companies stop buying their processors and instead begin using graphics cards to power their servers. This will not happen for a while however, as there are only a few applications written to use graphics cards as computational devices.

What Intel is doing is also breaking their license agreement with Nvidia. If this actually happens, Nvidia will certainly take legal action against Intel for breaking the license.

This is a bad move for Intel. It will hurt gamers, system builders, performance enthusiasts, overclockers, and the whole industry. I hope Intel rethinks their decision, otherwise my next computer build might be as an ATI or AMD customer.

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