AMD Plans To Open Cross Fire Architecture To 3rd Party Chipset Manufacturers

[D_o_S]

HKEPC reports that AMD's Crossfire architecture might become open to 3rd party chipset manufacturers. In the past, several attempts at getting Crossfire working on other chipsets have been made, but this was rather rare.

AMD hopes to open up the Crossfire architecture so that any motherboard with any chipset that features 2 x16 PCIE slots will have the ability to link 2 ATI GPUs via Crossfire. This would theoretically mean that NVIDIA chipsets would support Crossfire, too.

CrossFire has lagged behind in term of marketing share for a long time. Therefore, an open multi-GPU chipset platform would definitely be a wise strategy for AMD.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[C.Ash]

But if they do that, then no one will buy their own chipsets.. I mean, whats to stop me from only buying SLi chipsets and having the best of both worlds?

 

[newtekie1]

This is what I said both ATI and nVidia needed to do from the beginning. There really is no reason that Crossfire and SLI shouldn't be allowed on any motherboard that has 2 PCI-E x16 slots. Locking what motherboard you use via drivers is stupid, IMO.

 

[WarEagleAU]

ATI chipsets and ATI GPUS, no matter the merger, its still ATI. Now, with that being said, Im not sure I like this. However, like Newtekie1 said, it makes more sense to open BOTH platforms to everyone. This way, you still sell your bread and butter (GPUS) and everyone can use them happily.

 

[Aguiar]

This is a must happen so ATI develop CROSSFIRE,cause its very limited wright now as is.Trying to search for Crossfire MoBo´s is a little hard,if u r not in a rich country.

 

[Death Star]

This is the way it should have been since the beginning for BOTH nVidia and ATI. It's almost an analogy of Microsoft and free software organizations. It's too bad technology comes second to profit in most instances... But this is a good step. I would imagine this wouldn't necessarily increase chipset profits for AMD, but it certainly makes their graphics cards a great deal even more appealing

 

[AshenSugar]

ATI chipsets and ATI GPUS, no matter the merger, its still ATI. Now, with that being said, Im not sure I like this. However, like Newtekie1 said, it makes more sense to open BOTH platforms to everyone. This way, you still sell your bread and butter (GPUS) and everyone can use them happily.

nolonger true, ati designed up to the r600 alone, and the chipsets, but amd has pushed driver dev improvments, including ogl and CCC being updated and driver size reduced(check the driver side of 7.1 vs 7.2)

this is a good thing, theres really no reasion other then greed to not support multi gpu on any platform, VIA did it, check out multichrome setups, they acctualy work pretty well for a low end solution, also seems to work on ANY board with 2x pci-e 8x/16x slots, via did somehting right that time, tho the perfs worse then amd(ati) or nvidia its still impressive how well they did firt time out of the gate( put nvidia and ati to shame really, stable, works, no massive buggs)

and i wouldnt say that going nvidia chipset+ati card would be best of both worlds, i think it depends on the board, honestly i would rather have the amdti 3200chipset as it runs cooler and has better perf then the nvidia version(also less chipsets involved)

this is what i been hearing a long time tho, amd wants to make everything crossplatform they make, not cutting out any chipset maker or company, when amd does this, guess what, amd will start to push nvidia around even in the multi gpu market, if nvidia dosnt open SLI at least on the AMD platforms they will screw themselves out of alot of sales.

personaly if i was nvidia i would still make intel buy/licence the right to make SLI chipsets themselves tho, since intel is VERY pushy and needs/deserves to pay a price for it(read up on what intel puts companys who want to make chipsets/boards for their chips thru, its crazy)

well im excited that soon we should see GPU as PPU for games and have it working on ANY board we have with enough slots

 

[magibeg]

I would honestly love this to happen... because as it all is right now i'm sure theres a huge demand for a good ati/intel motherboard video card combo and there just isn't very many great ones out there right now. For my new system i was almost thinking about going nvidia just so i could get a nice mobo with a conroe.

 

[Zalmann]

I wonder how reliable the source of this "news" is. Never heard of HKEPK before.

All I can dig up on this by googling refers to the same source.

 

[Bastieeeh]

HKEPC is very reliable. They are based in Hong Kong and if you have been there once you will know there happens a lot...

 

[Zalmann]

HKEPC is very reliable. They are based in Hong Kong and if you have been there once you will know there happens a lot...

Well, I hope it comes true, as it will be great news for the whole industry. If they can pressure NVIDIA to also do the same, then that makes things even better.