Stories are going around that Intel is once again putting pressure on NVIDIA to make SLI available on Intel chipsets. This time they have an even better argument than last time. Then it was about proper Yorkfield support, but to be perfectly honest, NVIDIA could’ve solved it by just using proper components from the beginning. This time it’s the new Common System Interface, which NVIDIA desperately needs to be able to make chipsets for Intel’s Nehalem processors.
SLI is in no way dependent on NVIDIA’s own chipsets, but locked through software to only run on these chipsets. SLI works just fine on your Intel-based chipset. At the same time, NVIDIA has locked out AMD from enabling CrossFire on NVIDIA chipsets, even though it would work just fine too. Whether CrossFireX will have NVIDIA chipset support or not remains to be seen, but in theory it would work.
You perhaps remember that the Skulltrail motherboard has two NVIDIA chips on it, but they are not for enabling SLI, just bridges that splits the PCIe lanes. In other words, it’s just for show. How this will fan out, or if TheInq is just exaggerating, remains to be seen.
