With AMD's announcement of its $5.4B acquisition of ATi, it came as no surprise that this has brought a change in old partnerships between the companies.

As we know, NVIDIA's SLI has been one of the driving force for the AMD platform. Although NVIDIA has an Intel edition, it seems that NVIDIA has put too much eggs into a single AMD basket.

The NVIDIA for Intel edition did not appeal to much manufacturers. Out of a 100 reviews of mainboards based on NF4 or NF5 chipsets, you could hardly see any NV Intel edition reviews out there. In fact, I spoke to one of the top tier manufacturers before and they told me that NV Intel edition is of lower priority and they do not intend to send samples out to review sites worldwide. In fact, consumers will always prefer to pair up Intel chipset with Intel CPUs.

The same thing applies when it comes to AMD. Although AMD hasn't been in chipset business for some time. They still have the technical knowledge to make good chipsets. If you remember the ALI/ULi M1687 that can be found on the defunt SOYO K8USA mainboard, you will notice that CPU-Z shows you that it is a AMD-8111 Northbridge. AMD's expertise in chipsets will enhance the performance of ATi's chipset for AMD platform. With AMD's marriage with ATi, we would foresee that AMD will push CrossFire as the defacto dual graphics card solution for its processors. AMD CPU buyers will also tend to go for the AMD/ATI chipset.

Considering the new chipsets NF570/590 SLI versus ATi RD580, the RD580 runs way cooler and performs on par when paired up with a NVIDIA graphics card. ATi RD580 is also the first single chipset that supports Dual 16x PCIe lanes while NVIDIA still has to rely on two seperate chips running through Hypertranport to achieve that.

Although AMD sells lots of CPUs pairing it up with nF4/nF5, OEM goes to VIA and SiS too. Although these two companies aren't in the limelight, they will still be able to do well with a AMD/ATi blessing probably by licensing and enabling CrossFire on all chipsets other than NVidia and Intel. Will NV continue to lock out all chipsets in running SLI except Intel's and their own ? That remains to be seen.