AMR (ATi Multi-Rendering) is a three year old (as of 2005) technology which enables a single computer to use more than one video processor. AMR uses a technology ATi calls "Super Tiling" to connect multiple (two or more) video cards together. Up until the point ATi starts marketing it for the mass market, it has been primarily used by Evans and Sutherland, for commercial flight simulators, because of its ability to use more than two VPUs. ATI may stand for: ATI Technologies Inc. ... A Graphics Processing Unit or GPU, also called Visual Processing Unit or VPU is the microprocessor of a graphics card (or graphics accelerator). ...
Super Tiling is a technology that splits the screen up into equal divisions whose size is based on the number of VPUs. These divisions are called tiles. The partial images are then put together and displayed on the screen. All though not much is known about the interconnect method. it may be a device that bridges the cards together in a method similar to nVidia's SLI bridge card, or it may pass data over unused PCIe ports (as each card will be on a 16X slot, but will only be working at 8X interconnect rates)
Expected release
It is expected that ATi will launch AMR chipsets for Intel and AMD platforms this summer of 2005 with the R520 core.
It is now known that the official name of the commercial variant will be called Crossfire. Crossfire is a brand name for ATI Technologies multi-GPU solution, built on ATIs AMR technology, to compete with its rival nVidias Scalable Link Interface (SLI). ...
Performance gains
Because of its ability to connect more than two video cards together (as many as 34 cards have been coupled by Evans and Sutherland, though you will not be able to have this many VPUs in your desktop), performance will be much higher than that of the current SLI cards built around the nVidia video processors which can only couple two cards together.
ATI'sMultiVPU is how the company calls its ability to have two or more cards working together in a mode called Super Tiling.
ATI claims that it's worked for three years with this marchitecture but we have to add that all military systems built by Evans and Sutherlands or CAE civil flight simulators are using OpenGL only, and I really wonder about ATI's Direct3D part of the driver.
ATI plans to ship its MultiVPU this summer and we strongly suspect that this will happen just after the R520 "Fudo" launch.
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