Looks like the dumb "war" between Intel and Nvidia over SLI on X58 has come to an amicable cease-fire.

Digitimes reports that Nvidia's director of Technical Marketing for MCP products has stated that Nvidia will authorize native SLI support for X58 without requiring motherboard makers to put an nForce 200 chip on the motherboard - however it will require an SLI license from motherboard manufacturers, and those that license SLI will get to put a magic "key" into their BIOS that Nvidia's drivers will require in order to run SLI.

The SLI license will cost motherboard makers some money, but presumably less than the $30 Nvidia was going to charge for putting an nForce 200 chip on the motherboard.

Peterson also apparently said that Nvidia "is not currently planning to launch any chipset supporting QPI" but will launch a "DMI" based socket 1160 chipset later.

Frankly, I expect Nvidia to crank out a QPI based chipset as soon as it can if it expects to remain in the chipset business.

On a nice note, this means that we will be able to benchmark SLI vs. CrossFire on exactly the same X58 platform in the future!!!!!