It’s been a little while since we last heard from the folks at Lucid, but it appears that things are still going well and it shouldn’t be too long before we see real product on the market. For those unaware, Lucid first announced product last fall during the Intel Developer Forum. Their product is “Hydra Engine”, which, as a hardware-based solution, aims to improve upon the methods used by both CrossFireX and SLI.
Rory took an exhaustive look at the technology when it was announced, so I highly recommend you check out that article to learn a lot more about what’s in store. Lars-Göran at Fudzilla managed to catch up with Lucid’s Senior Product Marketing Manager the other night in Taiwan, and discovered that things are still on track for the tech, and that in the end, the one chip will be capable of two different tasks.
The first, which has been implemented already, is to have the chip act as a PCI-Express controller, allowing ultra-fast transfers between multiple graphics cards. This is not the consumer variant though, but rather is designed for workstations. The other solution is to have it act in “graphics performance mode”, which is where it would replace CrossFireX and SLI’s functionality. Lucid believes that their solution is better, however, and from what Rory and I saw at IDF last year, we think that it may very well be. It will still be a little while before we can get our hands on actual product, but if Lucid can do all that they company claims, it should be worth the wait.
We also found out that the interface on the ELSA solution that connects to a workstation or server is using an external PCI Express x1 connection, although as this is only used for transferring data to be computed and already computed data between the CPU and the Tesla cards, this is meant to be more than enough for the intended usage scenarios. We’re not sure how this works with other solutions, such as using Quadro cards.