Since AMD’s acquisition of ATI the company has no need for a third company to make chipsets for them, which eventually resulted in AMD enthusiasts being forced to run Radeon and CrossFire with 2 or more cards, no SLI support for them. But now we hear that AMD is looking to get SLI support with the coming 900 serie, which goes with the coming Bulldozer architecture.
What may have seemed like a for off dream has come in a new light through a slide published by VR-Zone implies that AMD’s coming chipsets 990FX and 990X will get SLI.
As many might remember from the launch of Intel Nehalem and its X58 northbridge it was unclear what would become of the SLI support since the company had no plans to use any bridge chips from NVIDIA in the reference design. This was resolved before the launch of Intel’s new platform when it agreed with motherboard makers to pay a licence fee per sold motherboard with SLI support, something that still applis and include Intel X58, P55, P67.
It looks like the scenario is the same for AMD 990FX and 990X, which means users of AMD processors will finally be able to enjoy SLI without some sort of SLI hack that needs updating with every new version of NVIDIA’s driver. AMD 990FX will support 3-way SLI while little brother 990X has to settle for 2-way SLI.
The license fee should not affect the retail price noticeably since the license agreement will be very much like the one NVIDIA has with Intel and at the moment there are several motherboards based on P55 and P67 at reasonable prices.
Sources: VR-Zone
