ATI’s Crossfire concept has from the beginning differed itself from nVidia’s SLI. Not just that the two technologies covers completely different video cards but also that one does, in nVidia’s case use a bridge between the two cards, where as in the Crossfire setup one uses a external cable to connect the two. Althought the lower end video cards doesn’t need this piece of hardware they still need a master-card. The master-card has the extra circuitry needed handle the communication between the two cards. However, in their next generation of videocards, ATI is going to use something very similar to nVidia’s SLI by using a simple bridge between the two.
In the future, neither external cables nor special master-cards will be needed, but all the necessary circuitry will be directly integrated into the video cards using the new Crossfire bridge at the same time, connecting the two cards internally. VR-Zone acctually did get a picture of the bridges connecting the card. It seems like ATI used two bridges here but who knows what the commersial model will to look like.
