jmke

You may recall that the folks at Lucid have been cooking up a GPU virtualization program called Virtu for Sandy Bridge motherboards. Virtu has a couple of, ahem, virtues. One, it will allow systems based on the Intel H67 chipset to access Sandy Bridge's QuickSync video transcode acceleration while using a discrete graphics card. Since the QuickSync logic is part of the Sandy Bridge IGP, it's otherwise inaccessible when a graphics card is in use. Two, Lucid bills Virtu as a power-saving solution for dynamic graphics switching, kind of like Nvidia's Optimus.

Either way, though, Lucid's software could be making its way into the package with revised Sandy Bridge motherboards based on the corrected B3 stepping of the H67 chipset when they ship. Lucid announced today that it has released a final version of Virtu to motherboard makers. We don't yet know exactly which motherboard brands will include Virtu with their products, but Lucid tells us it has been in productive talks with all of the major ones. Since Lucid is backed by Intel and is already selling its Hydra GPU load-balancer to motherboard makers, we expect it to get at least some uptake for Virtu immediately.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/20466

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