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All men are born truthful and die liars - Marquis de Vauvenargues
AMD shows off Radeon HD 3870 X2
AMD'S ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 marks first real dual-GPU supported and manufactured by AMD.
Previous attempts were mostly made by third party manufacturers such as ASUS, Sapphire and MSI, but this time AMD is coming into the frame.
With R700 looking quite interesting, it is clear that AMD wants to get as much experience with multi-chippery on a single PCB as possible.
Two Radeon 3870 X2s working in pair. Note the longer Crossfire
connector
As you can see in a picture above, the boards are connected via single bridge. The reason for first single-bridge appearance in ATI cards (HD2600 X2X has two bridges, just like regular parts) is the fact that one bridge is wired through the PCB and links the two GPUs locally, so "black magic" was not used in order to connect two the GPUs. Just logic and available resources.
This arrangement of four memory chips on back, four memory chips on top brings back memories of the Radeon 9700. Of course, the 9700 relied on old, DDR1 style memory working at 310MHz, while the 3870 X2 comes with memory almost three times as fast (GDDR3).
A look at cooler reveals that there are no visible heat-pipes
Beneath the cooler there are two chips. Each has its own 512MB of memory. But even with this board producing a decent amount of heat, this cooler does not use any visible heatpipes. It is just a longer version of the concept we saw with the 2900XT from the outside, but from the inside, there is nothing but copper fins.
This board will consume give or take equal power as a single 2900XT, and ATI opted to use one six-pin and one eight-pin PEG connector. With the 8-pin connector being specc'ed as a PCIe Gen2 requirement, it'so wonder that both AMD and Nvidia will use this connector in the future.
Catalyst 7.11 shows that Radeon HD 3870 X2 is already supported in the
driver
Software support is already there. While drivers have to be significantly optimised for different applications, there are still around three Catalyst releases to go before the product is ready to hit the market.
Overclock two GPUs on a same PCB
ATI OverDrive is supported, and you can see that two GPUs work at 777MHz each, while 1GB of on-board memory is working at 901MHz, yielding a combined total of 115.32 GB/s.
The temperature tool will probably have to be tweaked to recognise the number of GPU cores on the board itself, but the interesting part will be just how much power savings RV670 can achieve.
It turns out that AMD is dead-serious about taking the RV670 to new heights. The firm is promising a whole lot, and seeing a system with two prototype boards running Call of Duty 4 with all bells'n'whistles in a Quadfire combination only leaves you thinking how great 2008 will be. It all started with three great products, Geforce 8800GT, Radeon HD 3850 and 3870, and as soon as Geforce 8850GX2 (or whatever Nvidia decides to call its dual-G92 series) and Radeon HD 3870 X2 make an appearance, we'll be ushered in a new era of affordable high-end computing.
According to AMD, the time of big and expensive high-end cards is over, everything is now about scalability. Nvidia is starting to sing the same tune.
It seems that both Nvidia and AMD finally learned that it is far better to create a monster of a mainstream chip that can be scaled with as many GPUs as you want. An eight to-16GPU setup is a possibility for both ATI and Nvidia, but don't think about games here. Think about medical imaging, videowalls and so on).
When the board debuts (current target is February) with higher clocked Phenoms (B3 rev), getting two of these cards will set you back anywhere between 800 and 1000 US Dollars or Euro, meaning buyers of four Radeon HD 3850s today will not lose their value when these two pop along. ยต
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You say R700 is coming along interestingly or something, but you don't say anything about it? Care to share?
"An eight to-16GPU setup is a possibility for both ATI and Nvidia, but don't think about games here. Think about medical imaging, videowalls and so on)."

Hello? Videowall-gaming, anyone?!
I'm glad that y'all aren't paid to be photographers...
A new era is just starting and a bright future is up ahead.
lol not sure why you just took photos of the screen but i recomend alt+print screen :)
Let's not forget about the Distributed Computing enthusiast niche, here. There are science and math projects out there where these cards will leave dedicated cpus in the dust. For those of you who don't know, there's a project called Folding@Home that uses volunteers PlayStation 3s to crunch their protein models. There are people out there who are buying PS3s specifically to increase their processing scores in that project.

Protein models just scratch the surface, how about drug studies, weather research, number factoring, as well as real-time 3D animation.
Kaizer, are you the guy who writes fortunes for chinese cookies? I swear I had one just like that.
On topic, Crossfire and SLI are as much a stopgap as multiple CPUs are (note, not cores, but CPUs.) The world isn't that complicated, and the multi-core GPUs will come much as the Core2 and X2's delivered. For some reason, the GPU industry has a better blanket to hide under, it seems.
dear god. 8-16gpus. 2 is a useless waste of money. think of the memory overhead. they need to make like CPU's and learn to share cache/memory. without so much duplicate textures etc, suddenly multiGPU stuff might not suck.
I would not call any of this bright.
anyone considered the energy consumption of these silly rigs?
This is not forward thinking going on here.
"An eight to-16GPU setup is a possibility for both ATI and Nvidia, but don't think about games here. Think about medical imaging, videowalls and so on)."

was exactly the quote I latched onto. I believe CAVE was "invented" at MIT though the following was the only relevant link I could find at the moment.

http://cave.ncsa.uiuc.edu/

Granted, medical imaging and other vastly more humanitarian, military and other uses exist for a "videowall" -- CAVE is such a better term -- though gaming would be WAY cool! [or hot, depending on how soon GDDR4 can be integrated].

Excellent article pointing out scalability.



Does anyone knows if two of these X2's wil work in crossfire on a s775 X38 mainboard?
(Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6)
Inquirer headline seen in late 2008/2009...
"AMD Fusion preview: Requires actual Fusion reactor for power"
:)
The fact these cards only have one external crossfire connector means they can be used at most in a pair. Unlike the 1-chip cards that can be chained for as many PCIe slots as you have (drivers permitting). I guess this is also to stop people trying to put 4 two-chip cards in a system and wondering why 8 way isn't supported.

Also note the topology of this is always linear, which means the scaling for 8 (and possibly 4) GPUs might suck.
gddr5 is being released in this time frame, watch out!
why buy 2 cards when all you would really need is just one card to run crossfire. why waste the money when all you are going to do is game. there are other more important things this card can do in other professions to really make a difference.
( besides one card would really be a better bargan than 2.)
I still remember my original ATI Xpert 128 with 16mb memory and i was playing one of the Original betas of Counter-Strike and i thought things couldnt get any better than that.but then we get the promise of.Quad GPU gaming? Core Clocks of almost 800mhz? memory clock speeds over 2ghz GDDR4? The future of True HD Gaming is upon us- we should rejoice and throw Crysis Lan Parties my friends- tis a good time to be a PC Gamer- sucks for those with console-itis- console fanboys still truly* believing that the hardware in those silly toys surpass that of a true HD gaming Monster.Even a ridiculously high end gaming rig will not sway the opinion of a hardcore console fanboy..lets compare shall we? Just try to put an Xbox360 in the same ring a high end gaming pc. 
Intels Quad Core QX9650, Quad 3870's, 4GB DDR800 (pc6400), Quad 10,000rpm 150GB Raptor-X hard drives, High Fidelity Dolby Digital Surround Sound from a Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum with Klipsch Pro-Media 5.1 THX Certified Speakers Paired with Dual Apple 30" Cinema displays (i hate to refer to macs but they make a damn good monitor)
You're really trying to compare a $5,000 computer with the power of a $500 PS3 or $400 XBOX360? Cmon man, of course the PC would be more powerful, but you gotta admit the PS3's potential is pretty sweet. 

On to the article... I'm really looking forward to this card, I heard its gonna be around $500 which is a great deal considering its supposed to blow the the other stuff away. And having two of these bad boys is gonna be incredible.