Well there you go, AMD's Radeon HD 3870 X2 marks the first real dual-GPU supported and manufactured by AMD. Previous attempts were mostly made by third party manufacturers such as ASUS, Sapphire and MSI, but this time AMD is coming into the frame. With the R700 looking quite interesting, it is clear that AMD wants to get as much experience with multi chippery on a single PCB as possible. And two such Radeon HD 3870 X2's working in pair, interconnected with a single CrossFire bridge. And yes, it does resemble somehow like the GeForce 7950 GX2 from NVIDIA with the internal SLI connection but using only one single PCB to do so. - The Inquirer

AMD Shows Off Dual-GPU Based Radeon HD 3870 X2

The reason for first single bridge appearance in ATI cards is the fact that one bridge is wired through the PCB and links the two GPU's locally, so black magic was not used in order to connect two the GPU's. Just logic and available resources. Beneath the cooler there are two chips. Each has its own 512MB of memory. But even with this board producing a decent amount of heat, this cooler does not use any visible heatpipes. It is just a longer version of the concept we saw with the Radeon HD 2900 XT from the outside, but from the inside, there is nothing but copper fins and consuming give or take equal power.

Software support is already there. While drivers have to be significantly optimised for different applications, there are still around three Catalyst releases to go before the product is ready to hit the market. ATI Overdrive is supported, and you can see that two GPU's work at 777MHz each, while 1GB of on-board memory is working at 1802MHz, yielding a combined total of 115.32GB/s. It turns out that AMD is dead-serious about taking the RV670 chip to new heights. The firm is promising a whole lot, and seeing a system with two prototype boards running Call of Duty 4 with all bells and whistles.

It all started with three great products, the GeForce 8800 GT, the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870, and as soon as the GeForce 8850 GX2 or whatever NVIDIA decides to call its dual-G92 series and the Radeon HD 3870 X2 make an appearance, we will be ushered in a new era of affordable high-end computing. According to AMD, the time of big and expensive high-end cards is over, everything is now about scalability. NVIDIA is starting to sing the same tune. It seems that both NVIDIA and AMD finally learned that it is far better to create a monster of a mainstream chip.