MSI's got Lucid dreams.
Many of you might be wondering just what a Lucid Hydra is, and some of you might even be wondering what a motherboard is (though if you've found this article you're probably here by accident!).
The Hydra isn't a mythological serpent beast, but rather a small chip that was developed by Lucid, an Israeli company that manufactures these little silicon squares of delight.
They're delightful not for their taste (which is exceptionally unpleasant), but for the function that the Hydra chip performs - it claims to allow incredible performance scaling for multi-gpu systems.
Specifically named the Lucid Hydra 100, a series of unique algorithms within the chip take over from the driver architecture in the operating system, efficiently managing the distribution of processing work in realtime.
This allows individual GPU cores to be targeted to the best of their capabilities, making the Hydra a non-platform-specific chip that increases performance of any Direct3D or OpenGL game or application.
We'd not heard anything about it since its announcement and brief display at Computex, but the chaps at the Bright Side of News managed to snap some shots of the Hydra on a MSI motherboard!
Called the MSI Big Bang (or MS-7582 v0.8), it's not a production model yet but has every possibility that we'll be seeing an ultra-premium MSI board with this chip by the end of the year.
Even more surprising is that MSI was the chosen vendor to include this chip; traditionally the bigger heavyweights ASUS and GIGABYTE would bear the introduction of new tech.
We're incredibly excited for what the Lucid Hydra chip will offer so head over to BSN's article for pics of the chip, as we cross our fingers while holding our breath clutching a lucky charm and dancing a happy jig.
After all, changes like these don't come around too often.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012