Everyone knows that SLI was easier than Crossfire. You just need to plug a new card in a SLI motherboard and everything works out of the box. Crossfire was always limited with its master card. AMD plans to change this and RV570 chips already works without the master card. R600 and all the future RV6xx will work in cable less Crossfire, just like the SLI. The only trouble is that ATI is some 18 months late.

According to our Chinese friends Crossfire luck is about to change. AMD is thinking to open the Crossfire marchitecture and to make it work on every dual slot board. Crossfire works well at Intel P965 boards but it would be really cool if we could run the Crossfire cards on the Nforce boards as well.

The new idea coming from AMD is named OPEN Crossfire Technology, and will allow Crossfire on cheaper motherboards with 3rd party chipsets.  I guess it is up to Nvidia to allow Crossfire on its boards but AMD will let it run. This can be a new dawn for Crossfire but not earlier than May as we still need to see some serious competitor from DAAMIT camp.  

More details here.