PC-Gadget-Human Technology Review

Last night we had an interesting chat with Nir Cohen who is the senior product marketing manager at Lucidlogix, as he was vistiing Taipei to talk to some potential customers and he gave us a few more details about the Hydra chip and what it can do.

Although he wouldn't go into too much detail, we did find out some new and interesting aspects on what Hydra can do. First of all, the implementation done by ELSA Japan is not the same setup as that which will be found on consumer motherboards, as the Hydra chip can function in two different modes. To make a replacement for SLI or CrossFireX, the Hydra chip has to be configured to run in graphics performance mode, but ELSA's implementation doesn't generally work in this mode, as ELSA is using the chip as a PCI Express controller for use with Nvidia Tesla cards for GPGPU applications.

The Hydra chips have a built in RISC processor which is the key part in the graphics performance mode and this makes it a much more flexible solution than your average PCI Express controller. ELSA's implementation is said to be cheaper than using a Tesla server with four cards from Nvidia, but we'll have to wait and see what ELSA's official pricing will be until we know this for sure. In non graphics performance mode up to four cards can be used, but in graphics performance mode you're limited to two cards at the moment, but Lucidlogix is working on allowing for up to four cards.

We also found out that the interface on the ELSA solution that connects to a workstation or server is using an external PCI Express x16 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.

Another interesting aspect is that its possible to cascade multiple Hydra chips, although at the moment this is limited to two chips, but this would allow for more cards to be used. This could at least in theory allow for four GPU graphics cards, but Nir suggested that in the future up to 8 GPU's per Hydra chip could be possible, in theory at least.

For those that are worried that this will be another nForce 200 chip, there's no need to worry as Nir assured us that the Hydra has a TDP of a mere 4W and as such it shouldn't even need a heatsink, although we expect motherboard makers to add one just in case.

The reason why Hydra scales so well is because its the Hydra chip that controls the rendering and Lucidlogix is doing it quite different than the way AMD and Nvidia are doing things. Using multiple graphics cards have so far meant alternate frame rendering, split screen rendering or tile based rendering. Lucidlogix on the other hand is going for object based rendering which is an entirely new approach which means that each GPU get allocated parts of an object of the scene that's being rendered and then the Hydra chip pieces together the small parts into the final frame which is then displayed on the screen.

The proof is still in the pudding so to say, as Lucidlogix has yet to show a running demo of its Hydra chip, but with a bit of luck this should happen during CeBIT which kicks off early next month. So far we're only hearing whispers about potential consumer partners, but again, there's a chance that more details will be revealed during CeBIT.

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Written by Lars-öranNilsson