Nvidia Corp. on Thursday confirmed that mainboards based on the forthcoming core-logic sets from Advanced Micro Devices will be able to support Nvidia's SLI multi-GPU Technology. The move confirms importance of the next-generation AMD FX-series processors code-named Zambezi powered by Bulldozer micro-architecture for the PC gamers market.

"We are pleased to announce that SLI has been licensed to the world’s leading motherboard companies for integration onto their upcoming motherboards featuring AMD’s 990FX, 990X and 970 chipsets. Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, and MSI are among the first motherboard manufacturers to offer this new capability, with more coming on board shortly," said Tom Petersen, director of technical marketing at Nvidia.

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For several years few gamers who demand maximum performance did not use AMD microprocessors and chose Intel CPUs instead. Naturally, the lack of SLI support by AMD platforms was not a problem. However, it is expected that the next-gen FX chips with Bulldozer micro-architecture and up to eight x86 cores will offer major performance improvements over currently available AMD Phenom II chips and will even be able to compete against Intel Core i-series "Sandy Bridge" CPUs. As a result, SLI support could be useful on AMD's next-gen platforms with Zambezi processors.

It is rather ironic that SLI technology was introduced first (not taking an Intel server platform into consideration) on Nvidia nForce for AMD platform when Athlon 64 chips were king of the hill. Eventually, Nvidia launched nForce chipsets with SLI support for Intel platforms too. SLI used to be exclusive for nForce chipsets, but when Nvidia lost ability to offer chipsets for modern Intel and AMD chips, it had to start licensing the technology and did so only for Intel Core i-series chips. With potentially better performance of AMD FX "Zambezi" chips, Nvidia now has to license SLI for AMD-based platforms too.

Tags: Nvidia, SLI, AMD, Geforce, Radeon, Zambezi, Bulldozer