You want ATI SLI?

[Sylvanas]

The board that will bring it to you well here it is, the Ati xpress board that sports two PCI-E GFX Card slots. the clock is ticking Ati....

 

[RichUK]

Can ATI do this i thought that Nvidia had some sort of trade mark or somthing .. (what i mean is that if you look at this bored it looks identical to the asus a8n sli with regards to the position of the 16x pcie slots, i presume tht they would use a bridge aswell and that would be copying Nvidia right ???

 

[Lonyo]

AMR (ATi Multi Rendering) is handled on board, by the north or south bridge I though?
I doubt you can copyright the position of the PCIe slots, they are probably positioned there for interconnects reasons.
SLI is a trademark, so ATi cannot call their product SLi (hence they named it AMR).
The Inq suggests no bridge is needed.

 

[Fenuxx]

No, no bridge is needed for AMR. It is handled all within the chipset. Though, the only thing is, competing chipsets are better performers than ATI chipsets in the reviews and such that I have read. Oh well, if you want ATI-SLI, then, well, this is what you need (the ATI RD400, that is).

 

[Drayvn]

Originally posted by: geforcetony
No, no bridge is needed for AMR. It is handled all within the chipset. Though, the only thing is, competing chipsets are better performers than ATI chipsets in the reviews and such that I have read. Oh well, if you want ATI-SLI, then, well, this is what you need (the ATI RD400, that is).

Ive heard different, and ive seen a few previews saying its on par with the top performers of nForce aswell as being great overclcockers.

 

[Ackmed]

Originally posted by: geforcetony
No, no bridge is needed for AMR. It is handled all within the chipset. Though, the only thing is, competing chipsets are better performers than ATI chipsets in the reviews and such that I have read. Oh well, if you want ATI-SLI, then, well, this is what you need (the ATI RD400, that is).

You must not be reading this site then.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2269&p=8

Seems pretty equal to the nForce4 to me.

 

[Keysplayr]

Rather than speculate, why don't we all just wait and see?

 

[Fenuxx]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
Rather than speculate, why don't we all just wait and see?

Exactly

What I read were EARLY reports, nothing perfect, or refined. Things change, for the better or for the worse.

 

[rbV5]

but would support forthcoming graphics cards from ATI with a bridge connector

I thought MVP didn't require a bridge connector? I see they went with the ULI SB, I wonder how long before the show an AMD solution?

 

[crazyeddie]

The ULi southbridges are showing up in TUL/Powercolor's RS480 motherboards, too. ATI has a second generation southbridge in development to replace the SB400, but I don't think it's ready to ship yet.

It's interesting that AMD decided to target the Intel market with this, they'll be shipping about the same time Nvidia should be shipping Intel platform SLI. This should be a pretty interesting slugfest.

Imagine Dell and Compaq/HP selling P4-based AMR solutions to the masses. Customer service phone lines the world over will be melting down due to too much call center traffic!

 

[rbV5]

The ULi southbridges are showing up in TUL/Powercolor's RS480 motherboards, too

I saw it on a Jetway board as well, problem is that I see none of those boards actually available..too bad since they look like great overclockers and it would be nice to see some enthusiast ATI chipset boards out there.

 

[Creig]

Originally posted by: crazyeddie
ATI has a second generation southbridge in development to replace the SB400, but I don't think it's ready to ship yet.

The SB450 is an upgraded version of the SB400 that adds faster USB and Azalia 8-channel audio whereas the SB400 only supports AC97. I'm guessing the SB400 will remain in production, but be mostly used on low-end boards or office systems.

 

[nitromullet]

Nice find. I'm really excited about some performance numbers. I think that SLI numbers will look better than AMR initially though simply due to the fact that AMR is running on an Intel platform instead of AMD. Either way, it is good to start hearing some concrete info about AMR. I think next generation video card war will be a battle of the duallies. interesting stuff.

 

[darkswordsman17]

No offense guys, but you can't compare engineering sample boards to what will actually be available to the consumer. It has promise for sure, but who knows if it will deliver.

I keep hearing people say that ATi's chipset will be as good or better than nForce 4, but since there pretty much aren't any out you can't really say how good it will be (the MSI mATX one that I've dealt with didn't even have SATA drivers for it until a while after it was already out). Also, no one knows how well AMR will work, and whether or not it will be more, less, or as buggy as SLI.

Until actual boards are in people's hands, I wouldn't comment on them being better or equal to nForce 4. There's a lot ATi has to prove, at least IMO, as their latest chipset was actually a paper launch as well (ATi, paper launch, never....).

 

[nRollo]

The board will be for Intel processors, at least initially.

That would kill the deal for me. I think we all know how Intel SLI solutions stack up against AMD, and how Pentiums stack up against A64s for gaming in general.

 

[Drayvn]

Originally posted by: darkswordsman17
No offense guys, but you can't compare engineering sample boards to what will actually be available to the consumer. It has promise for sure, but who knows if it will deliver.

I keep hearing people say that ATi's chipset will be as good or better than nForce 4, but since there pretty much aren't any out you can't really say how good it will be (the MSI mATX one that I've dealt with didn't even have SATA drivers for it until a while after it was already out). Also, no one knows how well AMR will work, and whether or not it will be more, less, or as buggy as SLI.

Until actual boards are in people's hands, I wouldn't comment on them being better or equal to nForce 4. There's a lot ATi has to prove, at least IMO, as their latest chipset was actually a paper launch as well (ATi, paper launch, never....).

But Anandtech have reviewed the ATi Chipset/Motherboard tho..

And theyve stated its on par with the nForce 4 chipset!

 

[Mehmet Ali]

I'm waiting for ATI's SLI.It's gonna be great.But it seems that ATI's SLI only on Intel platforms.

 

[nitromullet]

Either way, ATi's marketing department has their work cut out for them... This is a graphics card web forum, and more than half of you are referring to ATi's AMR as "ATi's SLI".

 

[ohnnyj]

I think they may actually be shooting themselves in the foot by releasing for Intel first as the Athlon64s have proven themselves to be much better performers in gaming. And this is what SLI/AMR is all about really, gaming. So to release for a CPU base that is slower seems rather odd. Yes, there are more people out there that own Intel platforms and have this Intel only mentality but there are a lot (and I am venturing to say more) enthusiasts who own Athlon64/FX systems for gaming and as such would snatch up the AMR platform if available. I was interested in ATI's solution as well and still am but releasing for a platform that has shown to be deficient in gaming when you are trying to push how fast your solution is, does not seem like the best game plan.

 

[mamisano]

Looks like the ATI chipset will support 2x x16 links. From XBitLabs:

Particularly ASUSTeK shows off a mainboard based on ATI?s RADEON XPRESS 200-series chipset with two PCI Express x16 slots on it.

Regarding AMR:

* Multiple ATI RADEON X800 XT boards cooperatively rendering a single frame;
* Requires two physical x16 connectors on the mainboard;
* Load balancing and synchronization implemented entirely in software;
* No physical connector requires between devices;
* Currently assumes two identical graphics devices installed in both connectors;
* Offers several user selectable modes of multi-processing;
* Works with any PCIe north bridge.

 

[Creig]

I think what they're referring to is that you can have a x16 card in either slot and run it at x16. But they will still most likely each run at x8 in AMR mode.

 

[Fenuxx]

Originally posted by: mamisano
Looks like the ATI chipset will support 2x x16 links. From XBitLabs:

Particularly ASUSTeK shows off a mainboard based on ATI?s RADEON XPRESS 200-series chipset with two PCI Express x16 slots on it.

Regarding AMR:

* Multiple ATI RADEON X800 XT boards cooperatively rendering a single frame;
* Requires two physical x16 connectors on the mainboard;
* Load balancing and synchronization implemented entirely in software;
* No physical connector requires between devices;
* Currently assumes two identical graphics devices installed in both connectors;
* Offers several user selectable modes of multi-processing;
* Works with any PCIe north bridge.

All that says to me is the same thing with nForce4: That there are 2 physical x16 slots on the board, and if one of them is used, well, then it runs at x16 speeds. However, odds are that when there are 2 cards, they will run at x8 speeds. It would currently be too complex create a chipset with 32 PCI-E lanes JUST FOR GRAPHICS, plus, say 4 more for add-in cards (x1, most likely).

 

[Cheesetogo]

Will we be able to use our currnet ati cards, such as the x850xt in this board (in a dual configuration)?

 

[nitromullet]

Apparently, ATi had a dual X850XT/PE rig running at CeBit. I don't know of those were modified from the current X850's on the market or not though.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21749

 

[nitromullet]

Does anyone have any more info/rumors on AMR? I would love to see an "AMR news" thread get stickied. IMO, this is big news for a video forum, and I'm quite interested in this. We all knew that ATi ws working on its own multi-card solution to go against SLI, but I for one, didn't think they would get this far this quickly.