Logix Hydra 100 by Lucid

        Well it's been two months ever since i've writen anything here. So yeah .. I'll just blame it on the holidays. I've been drunk a lot, and away a lot, most of the time combining the two. Anyway now I'm back and after being sick for one week I've decided beer is back on the menu, and so I've started writing again. ( weird thing isn't it? ) . Anyway I had writen the intro for an article about iTunes cause i've had to use it a lot lately and i hate it. But I stopped cause I was bored. So now I'm going to talk about the new Logix Hydra 100 chip from Lucid.       

          HYDRA 100 Series is the first SoC from Lucid that is designed to scale graphics performance using multiple off-the-shelf graphics processors. The solution is seamless to the application and GPU vendor to meet the needs of various visual computing markets. The HYDRA 100 system on chip is designed to manage and load-balance graphics tasks from the CPU to the display across multiple GPUs ensuring efficient scaling for maximum GPU performance.         

         So what does this mean? Well basically it means that you can take any two GPU's from the same vendor let's say for example a GeForce 9800GT and your older GeForce 8800GTS and run them on the same machine each rendering only parts of what you see thus better integrating and distributing their resources. Lucid promised near-linear performance which is very believable and most likely be achieved. But they also said it might be above-linear which made some poeple question them. But if you think about it it's quite possbile. Having 2 GPU's each set to render what it's best at ( for example one renders shadows and the other textures) will you get more FPS than by simply combining their rendering power as you would in SLI or Crossfire.          

         Another thing to mention is that besides any two ( or more) GPU's this chip also works with any chipset making it easily adaptable. So the question now is how soon will the major companies make use of it and what pricing will it have. It's expected to hit the wide-spread consumer market by Q2 of 2009.

This is a rendering using the Hydra chip. As you can see on one screen one GPU renders specific parts and on the other, the other GPU renders the rest.     

Cheers