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

[Sable]

http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/itnews.php?tid=748630&starttime=0&endtime=0

Although the two leading company of graphical display chips, NVIDIA and ATI, have developed its multi-GPU solution (SLI and CrossFire) for a long time, the use of these technologies are just restricted to its own chipsets only. CrossFire support in Intel P965 and 975X are just the very exceptional cases, and there is no 3rd party chipset are allowed to use these features. It?s not technical issue that makes other company unable to design, but the authorization problem.

While the market was wondering if AMD would still allow Intel to support CrossFire in the future, AMD recently plans to open the CrossFire architecture to 3rd party chipset, so called Open Multi-GPU Chipset Platform. As of this drafting stage, it?s told that for any chipset which boast two 16x PCI-E slots, CrossFire is already granted to be enabled. Therefore, not only Intel, VIA, SIS, and even NVIDIA?s chipset may able to support CrossFire, resulting in pushing the market share of CrossFire.

Friends of the market pointed out that, ATI?s CrossFire has been lacked behind in term of marketing share for a long time. In order to push the market, Open Multi-GPU Chipset Platform would definitely a wise strategy for AMD. The opening is not just open the Crossfire architecture to Intel, but all potential chipset manufactures. As a result, not only AMD is benefited, the move may also result in pushing NVIDIA to open its architecture as well, making the two companies not to corner the high-end chipset market.

Wow. Didn't think I'd ever see the day this would happen. Obviously it's a good thing for us but is this showing that ATI/AMD are a bit desperate?

 

[TanisHalfElven]

yay. finally something good about amd

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: Sable
http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/itnews.php?tid=748630&starttime=0&endtime=0

Although the two leading company of graphical display chips, NVIDIA and ATI, have developed its multi-GPU solution (SLI and CrossFire) for a long time, the use of these technologies are just restricted to its own chipsets only. CrossFire support in Intel P965 and 975X are just the very exceptional cases, and there is no 3rd party chipset are allowed to use these features. It?s not technical issue that makes other company unable to design, but the authorization problem.

While the market was wondering if AMD would still allow Intel to support CrossFire in the future, AMD recently plans to open the CrossFire architecture to 3rd party chipset, so called Open Multi-GPU Chipset Platform. As of this drafting stage, it?s told that for any chipset which boast two 16x PCI-E slots, CrossFire is already granted to be enabled. Therefore, not only Intel, VIA, SIS, and even NVIDIA?s chipset may able to support CrossFire, resulting in pushing the market share of CrossFire.

Friends of the market pointed out that, ATI?s CrossFire has been lacked behind in term of marketing share for a long time. In order to push the market, Open Multi-GPU Chipset Platform would definitely a wise strategy for AMD. The opening is not just open the Crossfire architecture to Intel, but all potential chipset manufactures. As a result, not only AMD is benefited, the move may also result in pushing NVIDIA to open its architecture as well, making the two companies not to corner the high-end chipset market.

Wow. Didn't think I'd ever see the day this would happen. Obviously it's a good thing for us but is this showing that ATI/AMD are a bit desperate?

No, more likely AMD is using common sense...especially since AMD relies heavily on other chipset manufacturers for platform support, and AMD has always stated that the y never intend to get in to the chipset business.

Maybe AMD intends to kill the ATI chipsets and rely on 3rd party chipsets for support...this would explain the open chipset support for crossfire.

 

[Sable]

Originally posted by: Stumps

No, more likely AMD is using common sense...especially since AMD relies heavily on other chipset manufacturers for platform support, and AMD has always stated that the y never intend to get in to the chipset business.

Maybe AMD intends to kill the ATI chipsets and rely on 3rd party chipsets for support...this would explain the open chipset support for crossfire.

Gonna be strange though if they're relying on their competitor in the graphics market to supply decent chipsets. I thought one of the main reasons for the takeover was to gain ATI's chipset business as well.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

Originally posted by: Sable

Originally posted by: Stumps

No, more likely AMD is using common sense...especially since AMD relies heavily on other chipset manufacturers for platform support, and AMD has always stated that the y never intend to get in to the chipset business.

Maybe AMD intends to kill the ATI chipsets and rely on 3rd party chipsets for support...this would explain the open chipset support for crossfire.

Gonna be strange though if they're relying on their competitor in the graphics market to supply decent chipsets. I thought one of the main reasons for the takeover was to gain ATI's chipset business as well.

it probably was.
perhaps amd reliases many more ppl would go cross-fire if they did not have to switch mobos.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: Sable

Originally posted by: Stumps

No, more likely AMD is using common sense...especially since AMD relies heavily on other chipset manufacturers for platform support, and AMD has always stated that the y never intend to get in to the chipset business.

Maybe AMD intends to kill the ATI chipsets and rely on 3rd party chipsets for support...this would explain the open chipset support for crossfire.

Gonna be strange though if they're relying on their competitor in the graphics market to supply decent chipsets. I thought one of the main reasons for the takeover was to gain ATI's chipset business as well.

Hey, maybe VIA and SIS might step up and start producing decent chipsets again....I hope

 

[nrb]

We're presumably talking about a new specification here - we're not talking about existing ATI boards being able to run in Crossfire mode on existing SLI motherboards; and I imagine that any present-generation SLI (and maybe Crossfire) setup would be unable to operate on a board with the new specification.

The conspiracy theorist in me therefore suggests that this is simply an attempt to take a swipe at Nvidia. First, AMD wants to remove the ability of Nvidia to only allow SLI setups on Nvidia-chipset motherboards; and secondly they want to ensure that, on the eventual open standard motherboards (which people will buy for the added flexibility) you cannot use any existing Nvidia cards in SLI mode. If AMD are being really sneaky they may even have been able to define the new standard in such as way as to be compatible with current-gen Crossfire (but not, of course, with SLI).

 

[Sable]

Another thing I'm wondering, is the ability to use Crossfire on nvidia boards prevented at driver level or is it the chipset/bios? If it's just the driver then ATI can enable it, if it's the motherboard then I'm not sure nvidia will allow it.

They have a fairly big lead in single card performance and SLI is more mature than crossfire (excluding Vista of course).
They're also at an advantage in the chipset market as well with AMD only now getting round to releasing the much delayed RS690.

 

[tuteja1986]

Originally posted by: Sable
Another thing I'm wondering, is the ability to use Crossfire on nvidia boards prevented at driver level or is it the chipset/bios? If it's just the driver then ATI can enable it, if it's the motherboard then I'm not sure nvidia will allow it.

They have a fairly big lead in single card performance and SLI is more mature than crossfire (excluding Vista of course).
They're also at an advantage in the chipset market as well with AMD only now getting round to releasing the much delayed RS690.

Crossfire has caught up to SLI... Only major problem with crossfire was with the master card which is no more a issue. ATI just need to release R600 to compete with SLI G80 setup.

 

[PingSpike]

This is a very different stance then nvidias. ULi was bought out by nvidia, shortly after ULi motherboards started to appear that:
a) Performed as good or better then nvidias much more expensive NF4 platform
b) Could do nvidia's SLI, albeit, not officially.
Almost immediately after buying them out, driver changes were made to remove the function.

It looks like its the same for crossfire, there isn't much to the tech besides two slots on the board and a nod from nvidia/ati. I would guess the driver problems are mostly the video card guys problem still.

This all may be a necessary move for AMD. By buying ATI, they pretty much ended their partnership with nvidia...who for all intents and purposes were AMDs chipset arm for the last few years. ATI was developing a chipset business, thats true...but it was small compared to Nvidias. And lets face it, ATI only started that business because they needed an answer to SLI. It may be wise, since AMD lacks a ton of extra resources lying around, to focus on the core and let some one else handle the chipsets. Plus, by putting free crossfire in the hands of cheaper chipset manufactorers they might be able to put a little pressure on nvidia.

 

[hardwareking]

IF it happens it'll be good for the consumer.
Buy any motherboard with 2 physical pci-e 16x slots and it can run crossfire/sli and whatever intel decides to bring out in the future(multi-gpu)

 

[DeathReborn]

Originally posted by: tuteja1986

Originally posted by: Sable
Another thing I'm wondering, is the ability to use Crossfire on nvidia boards prevented at driver level or is it the chipset/bios? If it's just the driver then ATI can enable it, if it's the motherboard then I'm not sure nvidia will allow it.

They have a fairly big lead in single card performance and SLI is more mature than crossfire (excluding Vista of course).
They're also at an advantage in the chipset market as well with AMD only now getting round to releasing the much delayed RS690.

Crossfire has caught up to SLI... Only major problem with crossfire was with the master card which is no more a issue. ATI just need to release R600 to compete with SLI G80 setup.

What percentage performance does CF give you & how does that compare to SLI?

Does ATI's use of Profiles match up with the flexibility of nVidia?

Is CF selling as well as SLI?

Can I get CF in my notebook?


CrossFire is still a step behind SLI but it is catching it up.

 

[Avalon]

It'll just mean more AMD graphics cards sold. If you were stuck on an Nvidia SLI AM2 board, your only option would be SLI or single card. After this open crossfire architecture, you'll be able to consider AMD crossfire as well.

 

[nitromullet]

Interesting news, but I'm not sure what to make of it. At this point, I think a few facts are clear though.

1) To compete in the cpu industry effectively, Intel has concluded that it needs to also be a chipset manufacturer.

2) To compete in the gpu industry effectively, NVIDIA has concluded that it needs to also be a chipset manufacturer.

3) AMD will never effectively challenge Intel until it can offer a complete solution to component/system builders (esp mobile) that includes cpu, gpu, and chipset. I doubt that Intel was really Apple's first choice when it came to going x86, but AMD simply didn't have anything to offer that rivaled Intel's excellent chipsets - remember this happened before Conroe.

4) AMD/ATI will never again effectively compete against NVIDIA if they don't launch R600 pretty damn soon.

 

[Wreckage]

This is probably just to counter a lack of high end ATI\Intel chipsets.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: nitromullet
4) AMD/ATI will never again effectively compete against NVIDIA if they don't launch R600 pretty damn soon.

That's pretty crazy IMO. NV30 was a disaster and now look who's king. The P4 was pretty bad and look at intel now.

So long as AMD/ATI can release some decent mainstream/low end stuff for DX10 soon, they will be just fine.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: Stumps

Originally posted by: Sable

Originally posted by: Stumps

No, more likely AMD is using common sense...especially since AMD relies heavily on other chipset manufacturers for platform support, and AMD has always stated that the y never intend to get in to the chipset business.

Maybe AMD intends to kill the ATI chipsets and rely on 3rd party chipsets for support...this would explain the open chipset support for crossfire.

Gonna be strange though if they're relying on their competitor in the graphics market to supply decent chipsets. I thought one of the main reasons for the takeover was to gain ATI's chipset business as well.

Hey, maybe VIA and SIS might step up and start producing decent chipsets again....I hope

SiS almost always produced really nice chipsets. VIA on the other hand, not as such a good record as SiS. Since I started building PC's in '92, I have found that I don't mind buying SiS chipset mobo's. But if I see VIA on the box, not so eager.

 

[Matt2]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: nitromullet
4) AMD/ATI will never again effectively compete against NVIDIA if they don't launch R600 pretty damn soon.

That's pretty crazy IMO. NV30 was a disaster and now look who's king. The P4 was pretty bad and look at intel now.

So long as AMD/ATI can release some decent mainstream/low end stuff for DX10 soon, they will be just fine.

I dont know man. AMD has never had the capital that Intel has. Throw in the fact that they just swallowed ATI and their stock is at $14 compared to Nvidia's $31 and Intel's $21 per share.

It doesnt look good for AMD. If they dont get a viable product out the door and start making some money quick, it may be hard for them to recover. If R600 flops you may never see a high end GPU from AMD again for a while.

Losing horribly right now to both Intel and Nvidia, AMD can't afford to be a distant second place in both CPU and GPU arenas for long.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003

Originally posted by: Stumps

Originally posted by: Sable

Originally posted by: Stumps

No, more likely AMD is using common sense...especially since AMD relies heavily on other chipset manufacturers for platform support, and AMD has always stated that the y never intend to get in to the chipset business.

Maybe AMD intends to kill the ATI chipsets and rely on 3rd party chipsets for support...this would explain the open chipset support for crossfire.

Gonna be strange though if they're relying on their competitor in the graphics market to supply decent chipsets. I thought one of the main reasons for the takeover was to gain ATI's chipset business as well.

Hey, maybe VIA and SIS might step up and start producing decent chipsets again....I hope

SiS almost always produced really nice chipsets. VIA on the other hand, not as such a good record as SiS. Since I started building PC's in '92, I have found that I don't mind buying SiS chipset mobo's. But if I see VIA on the box, not so eager.

same here, both of my P4's are running on SIS chipset based Gigabyte mobo's, they are really reliable and very fast (as fast as a P4 can be these days anyway).

It's a shame that SIS stepped out of the performance chipset arena, their last attempt, the 655TX was awesome, faster than even the mighty i875, but boards with that chipset are pretty rare, many 655 and 655FX based boards were simply updated to the 655TX with out any model changes to the boards being made.

My Gigabyte GA-SINXP1394 started life as a regular 533fsb based 655 chipset based mobo in early 2003, a black out one night saw that board RMA'd about a year after I purchased it, I recieve back another SINXP1394...only this time it was an undocumented revision 3.0 (not GA-8S655TX Ultra) and had the 655TX chipset and 800fsb and Prescott support...it's pretty much the fastest skt 748 board ever released....just a shame Gigabyte makes no mention of it (i can't even get a BIOS update for it so it uses BIOS F1...the production BIOS), because it's a really good motherboard.

I just wish SIS and Gigabyte would get together again and produce another outstanding board like that...only for C2D and C2Q cpu's.

I still own a few VIA based Gigabyte boards as well, I never really had any issues with VIA, my GA-7VAXP (KT400) is a really nice board and has never given me any problems.
Same goes for my GA-7VRXP (KT333) which is still have in a box somewhere with a 2000+ on it, very reliable.

 

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: nrb
We're presumably talking about a new specification here - we're not talking about existing ATI boards being able to run in Crossfire mode on existing SLI motherboards; and I imagine that any present-generation SLI (and maybe Crossfire) setup would be unable to operate on a board with the new specification.

The conspiracy theorist in me therefore suggests that this is simply an attempt to take a swipe at Nvidia. First, AMD wants to remove the ability of Nvidia to only allow SLI setups on Nvidia-chipset motherboards; and secondly they want to ensure that, on the eventual open standard motherboards (which people will buy for the added flexibility) you cannot use any existing Nvidia cards in SLI mode. If AMD are being really sneaky they may even have been able to define the new standard in such as way as to be compatible with current-gen Crossfire (but not, of course, with SLI).

"As of this drafting stage, it?s told that for any chipset which boast two 16x PCI-E slots, CrossFire is already granted to be enabled. Therefore, not only Intel, VIA, SIS, and even NVIDIA?s chipset may able to support CrossFire"

and couldn't you already enable SLI (unofficially) in older ULi chipsets?

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: nitromullet
4) AMD/ATI will never again effectively compete against NVIDIA if they don't launch R600 pretty damn soon.

That's pretty crazy IMO. NV30 was a disaster and now look who's king. The P4 was pretty bad and look at intel now.

So long as AMD/ATI can release some decent mainstream/low end stuff for DX10 soon, they will be just fine.

Ummm... Ok, I agree, they will be able to compete just fine for a while with just mainstream parts, but if they don't get back in the game within the next few months it will be difficult for them to compete against NVIDIA for the gpu performance crown.

I keep hearing comparisons with R600 and NV30 and the fact that Intel makes a killing selling low end integrated graphics chips.

The difference between ATI and NVIDIA with regards to NV30/R600 is that NVIDIA had a much bigger share of the market at that time than ATI does now. Plus, the GeForce 4's were a huge success beforehand, whereass while the X1k's were awesome cards, I still feel that ATI lost high end marketshare to the 7-series and now the 8-series. NVIDIA has done a great job of marketing their cards and an especially excellent job of selling SLI chipsets/mobos. The only thing in the negative for them right now is the state of their Vista drivers, but in leu of any real competition it's not really a relevant argument either.

The difference between Intel's crappy (but lucrative) onboard gpu's and the idea of ATI simply living of off producing low end gpu's is the fact that Intel is also a cpu and chipset maker, and they include their gpu's as part of a complete package. What is AMD/ATI going to do with top notch cpu's and (most likely superior) low end gpu's if they don't have a chipset to complete the product line? NVIDIA isn't going to be their savior this time... Who's it gonna be? SiS? VIA? I know if I was in AMD's shoes, I wouldn't bet my future on either one of those.

...the point is that AMD doesn't really have a choice on if they want to produce chipsets or not. They can open the Crossfire standard, which is a great idea, but they still have to absorb ATI's prior chipset development and combine it with their knowledge of their own cpu's to stay in this game. They need to produce their own chipsets to help push their other products.

 

[Zebo]

Originally posted by: Matt2

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: nitromullet
4) AMD/ATI will never again effectively compete against NVIDIA if they don't launch R600 pretty damn soon.

That's pretty crazy IMO. NV30 was a disaster and now look who's king. The P4 was pretty bad and look at intel now.

So long as AMD/ATI can release some decent mainstream/low end stuff for DX10 soon, they will be just fine.

I dont know man. AMD has never had the capital that Intel has. Throw in the fact that they just swallowed ATI and their stock is at $14 compared to Nvidia's $31 and Intel's $21 per share.

It doesnt look good for AMD. If they dont get a viable product out the door and start making some money quick, it may be hard for them to recover. If R600 flops you may never see a high end GPU from AMD again for a while.

Losing horribly right now to both Intel and Nvidia, AMD can't afford to be a distant second place in both CPU and GPU arenas for long.

You don't think grandma can check her mail on a AM2 setup with a 1950pro?

 

[lopri]

AMD always boasted their compliance to open-standards. Whatever the reason is, I believe it's a good thing for consumers. I also think this bodes well with their Torrenza platform.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: CaiNaM

Originally posted by: nrb
We're presumably talking about a new specification here - we're not talking about existing ATI boards being able to run in Crossfire mode on existing SLI motherboards; and I imagine that any present-generation SLI (and maybe Crossfire) setup would be unable to operate on a board with the new specification.

The conspiracy theorist in me therefore suggests that this is simply an attempt to take a swipe at Nvidia. First, AMD wants to remove the ability of Nvidia to only allow SLI setups on Nvidia-chipset motherboards; and secondly they want to ensure that, on the eventual open standard motherboards (which people will buy for the added flexibility) you cannot use any existing Nvidia cards in SLI mode. If AMD are being really sneaky they may even have been able to define the new standard in such as way as to be compatible with current-gen Crossfire (but not, of course, with SLI).

"As of this drafting stage, it?s told that for any chipset which boast two 16x PCI-E slots, CrossFire is already granted to be enabled. Therefore, not only Intel, VIA, SIS, and even NVIDIA?s chipset may able to support CrossFire"

and couldn't you already enable SLI (unofficially) in older ULi chipsets?

Yes. I have one of those boards. SLI didn't really factor into my decision to buy, I bought it because it performed as fast as the NF4 boards and had better hard drive performance, while costing less. Nvidia bought ULi of course and has removed the drivers that enabled support...but they are still floating around out there. But since nvidia owns ULi, and presumably the maker of the board would have to release a bios update and or driver, I doubt we'll see support for crossfire coming out of the woodwork.

One of the slots is only PCI-E 8x though. This probably wouldn't matter, since thats the same performance as AGP 8x. I've seen PCI-E 4x video cards take a hit in performance, but I think 8x would still perform well with latest cards as of right now.

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: Sable
Wow. Didn't think I'd ever see the day this would happen. Obviously it's a good thing for us but is this showing that ATI/AMD are a bit desperate?

I did. I always thought that eventually multi gpu connections stardards would be rolled into the PCIE spec. This is just one more step in that direction.