ATI's SLI to work without connector

ATI'S WAY OF doing SLI called AMR (ATI Multi Rendering) will work differently from Nvidia's now world famous SLI. ATI will make its SLI work without a small printed circuit board (PCB) to interconnect the cards.

SLI uses two PCIe graphic ports and in the case of Nforce 4, works at PCIe 8X for each card and renders your picture with both cards. For this operation Nvidia SLI needs a special interconnection between two graphic cards. It's a small cable or PCB that transfers up to four GB per second from one card to another. For this operation, coordination is crucial as one card needs to know what the other card is doing.

ATI found a way to make its SLI work without this interconnection. In ATI's case, whenever it makes its SLI ready, you will just plug two graphic cards in motherboard powered with ATI chipset and it will all work without interconnection PCB or cable.

The upcoming chipset will have hardware support for dual graphic card rendering mode. It will be all done through the chipset and we guess that it will be wired in the new RS482 and RX482 chipsets. All the communication between two cards will be done through motherboard or chipset wires.

ATI is working hard to catch up with Nvidia in the SLI game, and it will try to make its chipset and drivers ready for launch as soon as possible. This is expected sometime in Q2 2005. µ