This is the second part of the interview we had with Godfrey Cheng, Director of Marketing Platform technologies at AMD. The first part is here.

Is the CrossfireX driver late?  When will we see the driver Publicly?

AMD: Our stretch goal was to publicly release the driver at the very tail-end of 2007, but the customer experience is critical to us and in favour of making the driver even stronger than it was and we decided to hold off on releasing it.  Our engineers worked over the Christmas holidays to add features and performance improvements.  We are in the process of completing our QA on the driver and packaging it for release.  This driver is already with our customers and pending any last minute issues, we will have a public release in early March, 2009….…just kidding 2008.

What is the name of the title that currently scales the best with three or four cards?

AMD: DX 9 scales pretty well across the board with titles like Call of Duty 4, Battlefield 2142 and the Source engine based titles.  For DX10, we do well with Crysis and other key titles.

Is the future of high-end CrossfireX?

AMD: I cannot answer this question without addressing the broader issues of power and performance per watt.  We learned a couple of key lessons from the R600.  We are very much focused on extracting the best performance per watt & performance per square mm out of our ASICs.  We have found that if we get these 2 metrics right, raw performance falls in line as well, this is evidenced by the ATI Radeon HD3000 series of products.  We are going to continue on this path of making extremely powerful, yet efficient, GPUs for the foreseeable future as this is the best way to deliver performance while fitting within the power and acoustic envelopes required by all of our customers.  CrossFireX is the architecture that will allow us to scale the performance of our ASICs to address everything from thin-and-light notebooks all the way to the monster high-end gaming rigs.

Do you support Intel as well as AMD’s platforms?

AMD: This seems to be the universal question that we get asked all the time!  The AMD Graphics team continues to enjoy great working relationships with Intel.  As an open platform company, this will not change on the graphics side.  My team actually manages the Intel relationship and the direction from our key execs is to ensure we deliver on our promise of open platforms.  To be explicit, CrossFireX will run great on AMD’s Spider as well as Intel based platforms.

We would like to thank AMD, Godfrey Cheng, John Swinimer and everyone else involved for making this interview possible.