This morning, Nvidia announced that its SLI technology has been licensed by Intel for its DX58SO "Smackover" motherboard.  As a result, the board will now be able to support both CrossFire and SLI (up to Quad-SLI) on its dual PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots.

When asked why the decision to implement SLI on the Intel "Smackover" board was not made at the launch of the X58 platform in November, Nvidia responded that "the companies could not come to mutually acceptable business terms [at that time]."  Moreover, we are excited to see that SLI, PhysX, and CUDA are all supported on an Intel manufactured X58 board.

“The addition of NVIDIA SLI technology to the Intel DX58SO motherboard has been a welcome addition,” said Clem Russo, VP and General Manager of Channel Desktop Platform Group at Intel Corporation. “The pairing of our new Core i7 processors on our Extreme Series motherboard and NVIDIA GeForce graphics has resulted in some of the world’s fastest consumer gaming PC platforms. For playing any of today’s hottest PC titles, this is one awesome combination that our customers have been asking for.”

“There's no doubt about it... our customers love SLI,” said Randy Copeland, CEO of Velocity Computers. “With this announcement, we have the ability to build them any Intel i7 platform they want, and know that whatever motherboard we choose, we can populate it with multiple NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. This gives our customers the greatest flexibility in purchasing the world's fastest gaming PCs.”

Nvidia's press release can be found here.