SLI Arrives on AMD 9-Series Motherboards
Nvidia is licensing its SLI technology for AMD 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets.
As reported earlier, Nvidia is now licensing SLI technology to manufacturers of AMD motherboards despite its rivalry with the company in the GPU sector. SLI will be made available for boards playing host to AMD's 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets.
"Long term gamers probably remember that for a long time AMD offered great high-end CPUs, but in recent years, AMD’s stature as the preferred gaming CPU fell by the wayside and Intel CPUs have been the gamers’ choice," Nvidia's Tom Petersen explained in an official blog. "For this reason, we’ve only licensed SLI for motherboards with Intel chipsets."
Previously AMD users required an unofficial patch to make SLI work on their AMD-based motherboards. But then news of Nvidia's official support for 9-series chipset boards surfaced last month by way of a leaked slide. It showed that the AMD 990FX chipset is capable of supporting two PCIe x16 slots or four PCIe x8 slots for running 2-way (2 x16) or 3-way (3 x8) SLI. As for the AMD 990X, the chipset only supports 2-way SLI (2 x8). There was no mention of the 970 chipset.
The slide also stated that SLI on AMD 9-Series chipsets use the same "key" technology that Intel SLI platforms use and the same certification process (the same SBIOS support is required). It also said there will be no support for Nvidia's nF200 bridge chip which was designed to work with Socket A AMD processor and DDR333/400 memory.
"We’ve been recently hearing chants of 'SLI for AMD CPUs,' and figured that now is a great time to do it," Petersen said. "After all, we want to make sure gamers can benefit from the new CPU competitive landscape and ensure they have NVIDIA SLI – the highest performance, most stable multi-GPU solution - to game on! According to Steam, 93-percent of all multi-GPU systems in use today use SLI."
ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI are among the first motherboard manufacturers to offer SLI support, with more coming on board shortly.

I'll believe it when i see it. I think AMD is just too far behind at this point.
Exactly, I'll believe it when I see it as well. I would love to see AMD come back with something amazing. Imo, it will be damn hard though. AMD hasn't released something great for gamers in a LONG time, and Intel's prices are not that high for the 2xxx k series either. I got my i52500k for 194$ (tax included)from Microcenter.
If Bulldozer can be ~200$ and performs better than the i5's, it will be nothing short of a miracle.
Finally!
Now that makes me a Happy Camper
Way to ask for a judge to find you guilty of anti-competitive practices buddy.
Full Disclosure: The bulk of my systems are Intel / Nvidia.
Also, what's with the Intel fanboys? You can't knock Bulldozer until it's at least available. Sure Sandy Bridge is looking pretty strong (now that it's fixed), but there's no reason AMD can't do better. AMD has still done well in the mid to low end builds, and offers pretty good price/performance, they just stopped dominating once Intel got serious. Don't forget what made them get serious to begin with, no one wants AMD to fail.
Nvidia is also losing ground fast to AMD GPUs. Remember tom's recent "best gpu for the money" breakdown? As it stands currently, AMD GPUs outperform and draw less power from nearly all similarly priced intel counterparts. To boot they're incredible in crossfire.
Hopefully we see AMD CPUs perform well. The statistics from AMD have been 50% faster than phenom II and 25%-ish faster than the old corei7's, which would essentially put them smack dab in the middle of sandy bridge territory.
And don't expect benchmarks before release. AMD has never done this and stays tight-lipped.
i for one cant wait for bulldozer to arrive.
though i am not planning to do a sli or a Xfire in the near future, my next upgrade is definetly going to include a mother board that can provide me with the option for SLI/Xfire.
and mobo upgrade is long overdue. 785G platform with ddr2 ram is really hitting my performance......
At the end, it seems that Intel is going to sit back over a corner and watch ARM getting stronger (and prolly spawning more RISC archs). So, AMD starts with ARM development again (the one that Meyer dropped/sold to Qualcomm if I recall correctly) and still have x86 licensing. Imagine getting something in between a CISC, RISC and parallel GPU archs. Maybe 3 archs on die, why not? XD
This looks very good for nVidia actually, even more than the short term possible benefit AMD might get from SLI itself. Oh, and that's actually thinking down the road; SLI might be a first step into working together (again).
Cheers!
When did AMD and Nvidia ever work together?
I still remember certain AMD numbers that bragged that the high end triple/quad core Phenoms could beat out lower clocked, low cached Core 2 Duos. That being said, if they have to hit 4 GHZ with an 8 core Bulldozer to be 25% faster than an old i7 I'm staying with Intel.