The motherboard certification, they said, will not "by design" exclude boards based on third-party chipsets.

Uh huh :) Not by design, but intent. I would honestly be very surprised if they certify other maker's chipsets.

Why not make a SLI standard? Why not? It moves the industry forward, and that is a good thing.

If i remember correctly, the Nvidia SLI solution requires both the "golden fingers" connecting the 2 cards, and some type of "SLI daughter card interface" on the motherboard itself, whereby flipping the daughter card gives you a different SLI configuration.

-edit-: Here is the picture of the MSI board with the daughter card interface: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2258

Now, this daughtercard i saw looks like it takes up space that could be used for an extra PCIe slot.

Also, for Via or ATI to implement Nvidia SLI, this means that they also have to implement this daughter card on the motherboard.

Finally, i read somewhere that ATI's SLI solution won't need the daughter card on the motherboard. If this is so, then ATI's solution seems more flexible, but at the same time raises the question as to if they will only make their future SLI/AMR (ati multi render) only compatible with ATI SLI cards by not implementing the "daughter card" interface on their chipsets. Unless the daughter card bypasses the chipset.

-Edit 2-: NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI reference design calls for a slot to be placed on the motherboard that will handle how many PCI Express lanes go to the second x16 slot.

Ok.. so i guess its only the reference design maybe.

neat. i hope its here before christmas (unlikely).

It would be cool if NVidia's NDAs expire the day before the nForce4 goes on sale :D (just as unlikely)