ATI Technologies, a leading supplier of graphics technologies, has enabled support for its CrossFire multi-GPU technology on a chipset that officially cannot support capability of sharing data streams between two graphics processing units (GPUs) within the system.

“This release of Catalyst introduces CrossFire support for the Intel 965 chipset. This feature is available for D3D applications, and is supported on ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire edition products. This feature is supported under the Windows XP operating system,” an official description of ATI’s Catalyst 6.9 drivers claims.

In order to support CrossFire multi-GPU technology, a core-logic set should have reprogrammable PCI Express lanes [with peer to peer writes support] within a north-bridge that a platform is based on. Meanwhile, Intel 965 core-logic, unlike suggested previously, does not officially support the reprogrammable PCI Express lanes.

Intel P965 memory controller hub (MCH) supports single-core and dual-core microprocessors with 533MHz, 800MHz or 1066MHz processor system bus, dual-channel DDR2 memory at up to 800MHz (PC2-6400) and can work with PCI Express x16 graphics cards. Intel said the new memory controller features technology called fast memory access, which allows to reduce the latencies of memory accesses. The new MCH, however, does not officially allow to use two graphics cards (unlike previously suggested) or support memory pipeline technology that accelerates data transfers between the processor and system memory, unlike the Intel 975X.

Even though the chipset may not officially support PCI Express lanes management, it may still have the feature enabled, but not declared. Furthermore, given that ATI Radeon X1900-series graphics cards use external DVI interface-based connector to exchange data, it is likely that ATI’s CrossFire for Intel 965 chipset solely relies on external interconnection and not on the chipset capabilities. There is no official explanation on how the CrossFire technology could be enabled.

Currently ATI CrossFire support on the chipset, which officially does not support multi-GPU technology, is limited to Direct3D applications, however, the things should improve going forward, according to ATI.

“We were able to enable CrossFire support for the popular Intel 965 chipset. Initially we will support DirectX games, since they do represent the vast majority of the games out there. We will follow up by the end of the year with support for OpenGL,” ATI’s chief of the Catalyst team told EliteBastards web-site in a brief interview.