I think you will be able to run CrossfireX on Intel machines even with this NVidia agreement. There was no announcement that said that this would change and the the reason why it was so easy to find so many boards that ran both CfX and SLI but more that ran just CfX could be that AMD doesn't really need something special to hook its cards up in conjunction... even though I'm speaking out my butt... they will just all have to put the cards in the slot and build out a whole database sort of like they did with the dule GPU cards... just have to eliminate the "licensing" and do all the talking and syncing off the bus.
That way Cfx can be on any platform and unless Nvidia wises up like Microsoft and its IE browsers will be stuck running only on intel chips. For those who say that intel will always be faster, remember how long AMD held the crown of fastest processors. AMD has a hell of a great GPU engineering team, just like NVidia, except that it seems that while NVidia claims it is supporting parallel processing, they are all doing it on one die and AMD/ATi has learned how to split that off into different die's on different cards and using CFX hook them together. For years we saw SLI's performance outshine CFX, but the latest generation shows equallity if not an edge in CFX. If AMD can engineer an effective bridge where timing will not be an issue, you won't have to lobby for PCI-E 3.0 or PCI-E 4.0 supporting 500 and then 1000 watts to support fast GPU's. NVidia is where ATi was with the 2xxx cards.... high power and HIGH LEAK CURRENT which is high heat. Thats where ATI decided transistor count is not the key to speed, put TRUE parallelism across physically separated cores. I mean just look at the GTX 580... GREAT card, but how long did it take to start to close in on the 5970?? Sure the ATi card was dual GPU but required less power, is a generation older, produced less heat had less transistors per GPU and shows what EFFICIENT engineering can do. Its like how do you lift a 100 ton wall. 100000 men Nvidia style or 10000 men and a pulley system ATi style.
Thats why I love the wars between the GPU companies... they keep everything moving forward at light speed.... and while AMD may not be as fast as Intel in CPU technology.... they have some fairly decently fast processors for 1/5 the price...... we know they are not 1/5 the speed....
Some of you may be dedicated Nvidites and Ati-ites and Intelite and AMD-ites, but some of us stand back and watch what each company brings to the table and support it.....
Its amazing how many people don't know ATi graphics cards are in the XBOX and that NVidia graphic cards are in the PS3...