Ready to 
Remember the “SLI-killer” HYDRA chip? It’s back!
Robert Hallock
September 22, 2009 11:38 PM ET in Tech
In August and December of last year, PC enthusiasts were in a tizzy over the LucidLogix HYDRA chip which allowed for SLI or CrossFire configurations with much better scaling. At the time, it was considered “dead at creation” technology because no mobo maker would knock their SLI/CF kickbacks to give it a try. But the industry has changed quite a bit since then, and so has LucidLogix, which returned to the 2009 IDF with an all-new HYDRA 200 chip.
The HYDRA 200 is a dedicated load-balancer that assumes the burden of splitting a game’s workload amongst the GPUs. Where once you needed an SLI or CrossFire bridge so the cards could talk to one another, now you only need HYDRA. And because HYDRA works outside of the GPU driver model, the chip can offer nearly linear scaling. HYDRA is the end of SLI and CrossFire configurations that only improve by 30% at tremendous resolutions. Instead, HYDRA offers about 90% improvement when pairing two like cards together at any resolution.
Different cards from the same maker? No problem. If one card is only 30% as fast as the lead GPU, total performance is very near to 1.3x the most powerful card. Different GPU manufacturers? Not a problem. While Windows Vista’s driver model limited GPU drivers to one architecture, Windows 7 allows multiple GPU drivers, and so HYDRA now supports mixed-GPU environments.
Yes, that is a GeForce and a Radeon. (Image credit: Hexus.net)
The whole kit is based on a Tensilica Diamond RISC chip that Lucid has attached to PCI Express lanes. The bigger, badder HYDRA 200 is manufactured by TSMC on a 65nm process and consumes about 6W of power in operation.
The technology isn’t a pipedream this time, either. MSI has signed on to produce a motherboard called the Big Bang based on Intel’s new P55 chipset and it will launch on September 29.
The MSI Big Bang (Image credit: Iopanel.net)
It's the real deal! (Image Credit: Iopanel.net)
A shot of the HYDRA 200 chip (Image credit: Iopanel.net)
HYDRA is an amazing technology, but it creates as many problems as it solves: How will AMD and NVIDIA respond to a product that renders their technology redundant? How many GPUs can the HYDRA support? How many mobo makers will break ranks from the SLI/CrossFire ecosystem? How expensive is the chip? Only time will tell, but we’re excited.
RSS