NVIDIA Licenses SLI to AMD

NVIDIA has agreed to license its multi-GPU SLI technology to AMD chipsets, according to an official blog entry by Tom Petersen, Director of Technical Marketing, NVIDIA. This is for the first time since 2006, when AMD acquired ATI, thus becoming NVIDIA's main competitor. NVIDIA SLI has been previously available for AMD processor based motherboards, but with NVIDIA NForce 4 chipset. It was later made available on high-end Intel chipsets such as the X58 Express, while support for motherboards with AMD processors was withdrawn.

Tom Peterson states the reasons for this on his blog, "in recent years, AMD's stature as the preferred gaming CPU fell by the wayside and Intel CPUs have been the gamers' choice.  For this reason, we ve only licensed SLI for motherboards with Intel chipsets." He further stated the reason for this change of stand, "However, we've been recently hearing  chants of "SLI for AMD CPUs", and figured that now is a great time to do it. After all, we want to make sure gamers can benefit from the new CPU competitive landscape and ensure they have NVIDIA SLI."

NVIDIA has licensed SLI to be implemented on AMD's 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets as a start and more may follow suit later, depending on the success of this move. ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock and MSI will be amongst the first motherboard manufacturers to offer this new capability.