Lucid's Hydra 100 - Closer Than Ever
 

ELSA Japan, a popular AIB (Add-In-Board) company has announced the first product to incorporate Lucid Logix's Hydra 100 series ASIC. The product is aimed at HPC (High performance computing), the same space targetted by Nvidia's Tesla™ and AMD's Stream™ computing products.

If you are not yet familiar with Lucid Logix and their Hydra 100 series, chances are you will hear a lot about them in the near future. Lucid came into the spot light last year when they promised a linear scaling solution for multi-gpu setups. The fact that Intel was one of their key investors raised some eyebrows.


Multi-gpu setups are plagued with a lot of issues; unimpressive scaling (beyond 2 GPUs), limited rendering modes/profiles etc. is a simple one. Intercept the calls (DirectX or OpenGL) via software and load balance it dynamically across the number of available GPUs. This solution requires the presence of an ASIC, a "bridge" chip (hardware) and a software driver. In theory, the solution sounds promising but no public demo of the product has held the promise back.

http://gpucafe.com/2009/02/lucids-hy...ser-than-ever/

One question: How?