AMD's 990X, 990FX chipsets to have SLI support?

According to a slide published by VR-Zone, it should get a whole lot easier to find AMD-based motherboards with SLI support. As you probably know, Nvidia was forced to shut down its chipset business after Intel forbade the GPU-makerfrom producing chipsets compatible with Core i series processors (or any other Intel CPU with an embedded memory controller).

Since Nvidia can't directly sell nForce chipsets, the company licenses its SLI technology to motherboard makers like Asus and Gigabyte. As such, consumers have been virtually unaffected by the lack of nForce boards -- at least folks running an Intel processor anyway. Those faithful to AMD have a very limited selection of SLI-compatible motherboards.

Fortunately, it appears Nvidia is extending that agreement to include AMD's upcoming 990X and 990FX chipsets, which are slated to launch in the second quarter of 2011 alongside AMD's anticipated Bulldozer processors. According to the slide, the former chipset will be limited to two-way SLI while the latter will support both two- and three-way SLI.