One thing that caught most of the attention back when the first picture of the upcoming Radeon R9 290X leaked was the actual lack of the Crossfire connector on it as the card will now handle the communication between GPUs via PCI-Express connector.

Actually, according to the leaked slide, AMD Hawaii based Radeon R9 290X and the R9 290 will feature new AMD Crossfire technology that will use hardware DMA engine in the AMD Crossfire compositing block and that is desinged for AMD Eyefinity and UltraHD resolutions, allows direct access between GPU display pipelines over PCI-Express without the need for an external connector and with any performance penalty when compared to previous external bridge.

This also cuts back on the total cost since you no longer need to implement the Crossfire connector on the PCB and partners no longer need to bundle it with their graphics cards. It is not a big save but with low margins, every last cent counts.

AMD talked a bit about its new Crossfire technology but did not reveal if the PCI-Express 3.0 is the only one to support it considering that it takes additional bandwidth. Of course, most new high-end motherboards actually feature at least two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, this should not be a big issue.

In any case, all will be clear as soon as AMD lifts the NDA and we see some first reviews.





Source: Fudzilla.com, Wccftech.com.