

Nvidia and AMD Hug It Out, SLI Coming to AMD Motherboards - Iria
http://hothardware.com/News/Nvidia-and-AMD-Hug-It-Out-SLI-Coming-to-AMD-Motherboards/

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Symmetry
The article at Techreport seems more informative than this one.
<http://techreport.com/discussions.x/20853>

To summarize, NVidia has been making chipsets for use with AMD CPUs and their
main selling point has been that if you wanted to run SLI with an AMD CPU you
had to get an NVidia motherboard. Because NVidia is getting out of the
motherboard business, however, there's no reason for them to not let AMD sell
northbridges that can handle SLI, and now the 9XX series of AMD northbridge
chips will work with SLI.

EDIT: grammar

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dman
I am trying to find more information about this as we speak - but I will be
very surprised if SLI just works with plain vanilla 9xx series chipsets that
come straight from AMD. Thanks for adding the techreport link.

~~~
Symmetry
Why would you be surprised? After all, SLI works with plain vanilla X58
chipsets straight from Intel now. Getting SLI certified requires validation
from NVidia but as far as I know thats just a matter of PCB design, not extra
components.

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dman
When Nvidia announced this for Intel Anandtech used the headline - "Hell
Freezes Over: NVIDIA Announces Native SLI Support for the Intel X58 Chipset".
So perhaps Nvidia not insisting on things like the NF200 chip is surprising?

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dman
Very poor reporting - Nvidia is not licensing SLI to AMD. AMD has its own
technology (Crossfire) which is similar to SLI. All Nvidia is doing is enable
Motherboard that make AMD based motherboards to include SLI support on their
motherboards. AMD graphics card will not be using SLI technology to get
multicard support.

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wccrawford
Not sure where you get your info from. Here's the horse's mouth:
[http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/04/you-asked-for-it-you-got-
it-...](http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/04/you-asked-for-it-you-got-it-sli-for-
amd/)

"So today, we are pleased to announce that SLI has been licensed to the
world’s leading motherboard companies for integration onto their upcoming
motherboards featuring AMD’s 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets."

Yes, that says they licensed it.

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dman
Not to AMD - to motherboard makers that make motherboards for AMD chips.

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Symmetry
No, the licensed it to AMD. Motherboard makers that make boards that accept
AMD CPUs due so with a chipset that AMD provides (Nvidia used to provide them
too, but no longer does). It might in theory be possible for mother board
makers to hack things so that you can run NVidia graphics cards in SLI when
using an AMD chipset but I've never heard of that happening. All of the
relevant liscensing was between AMD and NVidia. There might be some
certification process that motherboard manufacturers need to go through before
they can claim that their boards support SLI, but the technology license was
definitely to AMD.

