14 DAY TRIAL // Pictures presenting R570 and RV560 reference design have been circulating on the Internet for some time now, but no one could explain two mysterious SLI-like connectors found in the upper left of these upcoming video cards.
ATI revealed that it was planning the development of an Nvidia SLI alternative. The pictures actually present designs with multi-card SLI connectors which will facilitate interconnection of more than three Crossfire-ready boards.
It seems that ATI was inspired by Nvidia's own SLI connectors, but with one difference. Nvidia's SLI connector is one way only: it either sends or receives data and cannot do both actions at the same time. ATI designed the connector to work both ways at the same time (you can actually see two separate connectors in the image) for increased bandwidth when connecting multiple cards. It took ATI almost a year to develop these internal connectors, the Inquirer informs. ATI admitted that the upcoming R600 GPU will support these two-way internal connectors, apart from the usual external Crossfire connector.
Nvidia criticized Crossfire designs as needing a higher bandwidth than the one provided by PCIe 16X architecture so ATI has to connect future designs internally or externally. It looks like Nvidia was right, but ATI managed to develop these internal connectors anyway, and, starting October 17th, graphics enthusiasts might see the fastest and most effective multi GPU configurations. ATI prepares some nice surprises for this fall and the future R600 GPUs may prove to be hard to beat in multi-GPU configurations.