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Nvidia and AMD Hug It Out, SLI Coming To AMD Mobos
MojoKid writes "In a rather surprising turn of events, NVIDIA has just gone on record that, starting with AMD's 990 series chipset, you'll be able to run multiple NVIDIA graphics cards in SLI on AMD-based motherboards, a feature previously only available on Intel or NVIDIA-based motherboards. Nvidia didn't go into many specifics about the license, such as how long it's good for, but did say the license covers 'upcoming motherboards featuring AMD's 990FX, 990X, and 970 chipsets.'"
Since all the exclusion did was hurt nVidia in sales for people who stay loyal to AMD and refuse to go intel just for SLi. Allowing SLi on AMD boards will boost nVidias sales a bit.
Hard to say(until bulldozer drops) whether NVIDIA thinks that they are really good, or good enough. Since NVIDIA no longer has an intel chipset business, tying SLI to Intel platforms no longer serves to move more product; but to restrict the size of their potential market(since anybody who wants the, often quite aggressive, price/performance of an AMD part won't be buying more than one NVIDIA card, at most).
So long as they are confident that AMD's CPUs will be good enough not to bottleneck SLI configurations, trying to sell multiple cards to people who purchase AMD CPUs seems only reasonable. If, of course, they think that the CPUs will be even better than good enough, the approach is even more reasonable, so it doesn't tell us too much about which it is.