Nvidia blinked first.

Intel did not want to give Nvidia a CSI license because Nvidia would not allow SLI on intel motherboards with multiple GPU slots.

Nvidia did not want to give Intel an SLI license because it wants to sell motherboards... it would REALLY prefer if people could only get SLI if they bought Nvidia motherboards.

Unless there is an unannounced backroom deal giving Nvidia CSI, Nvidia caved, and there will be SLI Nehalem motherboards - with an Intel x58 chipset and an Nvidia nForce 200 chip that has "patented SLI technology for graphics bandwidth management and multi-GPU peer-to-peer comunications both required to optimize graphics performance" - which is marketspeak for we would only let Intel do SLI if we got to add a small chip for which we will charge an arm, leg and reproductive organs for.

Technically, without driver games/restrictions (read DRM) there is NO reason why SLI should not work on ANY multi-slot PCIe motherboard that supports at least 8x on the slots. None. Zip. Zilch.

Remember the SLI patches that were floating around on the net for non-Nvidia chipsets a while ago? Legal threats and driver changes killed those.

Actually, the nForce 200 chip WILL have one technical result: it will slow down the GPU's - instead of talking to 16x PCIe 2.0 from the x58 directly, a single 16x PCIe 2.0 slot will be "splt up" by the nForce 200 to two PCIe "16x" slots, just like on the 780 motherboards.