CrossFire & P35: Fingers Pointing

Ξ May 24th, 2007 | → | ∇ |

In a classic case of industry bureaocracy, ATI’s Crossfire multi-GPU technology is broken on the new Intel Bearlake P35 chipsets. Intel is pointing the finger at AMD, and AMD is pointing the finger back at Intel. Of course, nobody is getting anywhere with this, because neither company is giving the other access to specifications of their products. After all, they are in competition.

CrossFire doesn’t work on Intel’s P35 chipset and motherboard manufacturers are being left in the dark as to when it’s going to get sorted out.

Two R600s do work in CrossFire because they have the necessary drivers, and we’ve replicated this in our own labs with a couple of HD2900XTs, the same Asus P5K Deluxe motherboard and BIOS. However, every other CrossFire model we’ve tried from the previous generation hasn’t work for us in a variety of P35 motherboards.

They may not be talking to each other but bit-tech has good relations with both and it seems like it’s AMD being behind with the drivers, but we don’t know what kind of position Intel put them in previous to this. From what I can gather though, both camps are doing the best they can however.
There is some internal beta drivers which we have and are due to test, but there’s no noise yet telling us when this will be publicly available.

ATI’s Catalyst 7.5 drivers will be out in the next few days, so hopefully that will be included there. Otherwise, it’s another month’s wait at least.

Did anyone else see this coming? Two competitors with forced grins and digitally shaking hands wasn’t too far from the optimists’ imagination, but instead it seems they’ll be dragged kicking and screaming down a path neither can avoid: Intel doesn’t have multi-GPU but it has the lion’s share of the market and needs AMD for the enthusiasts, whereas AMD just needs as much market as it can get.

We can only hope they sort it out properly before X38 arrives. Otherwise you’ll both be up shit creek without a paddle.

There is a winner in all of this though, and Nvidia must be laughing all the way to the bank.