All-in-Wonder With Crossfire?
Dave at Beyond3D has just posted an interesting bit of news regarding whether ATI's All-in-Wonder graphics cards could ever be used in a Crossfire configuration. In the past, ATI has hinted that this sort of combination would certainly be possible. However, Dave does a good job of outlining the pros and cons as to whether this configuration will ever make it to market.
Previous indications from ATI suggested that Crossfire with All-In-Wonder's would be possible, but the solutions requiring a master card did not have the software to display any TV images; now however, probably due to the level of software development required, ATI are stating that Crossfire solutions that require a master board will [i]not[/i] be supported. This means that users or potential users of the recently announced All-In-Wonder X1800 XL can not get a performance increase via Crossfire once X1800 Crossfire solutions appear.
This doesn't leave All-In-Wonder Crossfire a complete impossibility though. At the launch of the X1000 series ATI had stated that X1300 solutions wouldn't need a master board, instead two standard X1300's could be used and communication would be achieved via the PCI Express bus; more recently X1600 has dropped the master / slave concept for Crossfire and also adopts the PCI Express communication method. In this Crossfire scenario there need be no distinction between a slave and master board, potentially other than the slot they are plugged into in the motherboard; should All-In-Wonder solutions be released based on X1300 or X1600 then these could operate in Crossfire and still have all the All-In-Wonder functionality, as long as the All-In-Wonder board is the one driving the display.
