ATI now has its own version of a multi GPU technology through Crossfire. The performance is very good, but there are other limitations, such as the usability and upgrade possibilities. Crossfire requires a Master card, for the high performance series, known as Crossfire Edition. This card has special circuits integrated making it possible for the video cards to work together and send one signal to the monitor. Now it seems like ATI’s next generation video cards, namely RV570 and RV560 that will be made with 80nm technology, won’t need the Master card system. These cards will all be made with Crossfire support integrated and will therefore not require anything more than two equal cards to get a Crossfire configuration to work.
In other terms just as NVIDIA’s SLI technology. Talking about SLI it also seems that ATI will be going for an internal PCB bridge instead of the external cable. A system we can’t complain about and are hoping for, but at the same time it’s going to be interesting to hear what NVIDIA has to say about this. Integrated support for Crossfire also adds other possiblities.
“These memos also reveal to us that due to the on-chip Crossfire will allow the possibility of multi-GPU dice and packaging. Several manufacturers attempted multiple GPUs on a single card over the last couple years with very minimal success.”
Source: DailyTech
