I edited the above post: 2x16 standard, add another with a special chip.

My reading of the rumors and speculations is that Crossfire and other multi-card setups will slowly lose support by AMD and Nvidia. The wave of the future (Navi??) will be single cards with multiple GPU chips that act like a single GPU chip -- very cost effective (smaller chips -- less bad ones) and potentially unlimited shaders. So, maybe this is just the beginning of the future.