Next Gen ATI, On-Chip Crossfire - No Master Card Required

Internal ATI memos and roadmaps have revealed to us that the next generation 80nm RV570 and RV560 GPUs will not require a master card to operate in Crossfire mode. Both GPUs have onbroad Crossfire support, meaning they are both effectively "masters."

Without master cards, ATI will also be dropping the external Crossfire TDMS transmitter. Radeon X1300 and Radeon X1600 require neither the dongle nor master cards to operate in Crossfire mode, but they are relatively low end cards as well. Unfortunately, all is not beer and Skittles: the same memos claiming RV570 and RV560 have on-chip Crossfire support also claim that the chips may require a PCB bridge to really operate in full Crossfire mode. This is extremely similar to NVIDIA’s SLI implementation.

DailyTech