Tuesday, August 11th 2009
MSI ''Big Bang'' P55 Motherboard Implements Lucid Hydra
MSI already has its task cut out when Intel's first socket LGA-1156 processors hit stores. With entry-level P55-CD53, mid-range P55-GD65, enthusiast-range P55-GD80, and a micro-ATX P55M-GD45 motherboard offering in place, the lineup seems just about complete, except for two mysterious motherboards that aren't part of the list. First being the G9P55-DC that packs an NVIDIA BR-03 bridge chip that enables 3-way SLI with better interface bandwidth to the three graphics cards, and second is under the looking-glass today. Codenamed "Big Bang", this prototype motherboard by MSI packs a LucidLogix Hydra technology, which clearly on paper, is the next big thing as far as multi-GPU systems go.
MSI P55 "Big Bang" looks similar to the P55-GD80, except for that under the top chipset heatsink (which, by the way, is purely cosmetic on the GD80), is a Lucid Hydra chip. The chip connects to all three (or four) PCI-Express x16 slots (lane configuration not known), and allows Lucid's multi-GPU technology that lets you make practically any combination of graphics cards, for performance scaling. The member cards needn't have parity on their performance, as the Hydra chip does all the load-balancing by itself. Products based on Hydra are slowly, but surely showing up in small numbers for now, including enterprise-grade rack-mount graphics rendering boxes like this one, conceived a long time ago. A lot of details are yet to emerge, especially around if there are more motherboard manufacturers eying Hydra, about when a Hydra-based product actually makes it to shelves, and more importantly, when does MSI plan to sell this and G9P55-DC.
Source:
IOPanel
MSI P55 "Big Bang" looks similar to the P55-GD80, except for that under the top chipset heatsink (which, by the way, is purely cosmetic on the GD80), is a Lucid Hydra chip. The chip connects to all three (or four) PCI-Express x16 slots (lane configuration not known), and allows Lucid's multi-GPU technology that lets you make practically any combination of graphics cards, for performance scaling. The member cards needn't have parity on their performance, as the Hydra chip does all the load-balancing by itself. Products based on Hydra are slowly, but surely showing up in small numbers for now, including enterprise-grade rack-mount graphics rendering boxes like this one, conceived a long time ago. A lot of details are yet to emerge, especially around if there are more motherboard manufacturers eying Hydra, about when a Hydra-based product actually makes it to shelves, and more importantly, when does MSI plan to sell this and G9P55-DC.
87 Comments on MSI ''Big Bang'' P55 Motherboard Implements Lucid Hydra
Of course I think they will sell more on a motherboard, but I really like the idea of a separate graphics subsystem altogether, with its own PSU and cooling etc, not to mention when you upgrade your pc, you don't need to buy another board with a lucid chip, you can keep keep the extra box.
I want it so bad;
1600x1200
each card would be doing 1600x600 on its own monitor, as far as it was concerned
Lucid distributes the work into polygons. One GPU handles the characters whereas the other handles the environment. This way they don't have to load the same texture data so the system actually doubles the available video memory with two cards.
That's why you can couple different cards. They're doing different things.