CES 2010: MSI's top-end mobo and a dual-screen tablet.
MSI have placed a relatively huge amount of weight behind their latest product, the Big Bang Fuzion. While it's based around a standard P55 Express chipset, the other chip onboard is none other than Lucid's Hydra chip, in the flesh.
The Hydra chip is a hardware-based implementation of dual-gpu performance management; in other words, it's a chip that does SLI and Crossfire in hardware. This is done through driver interaction, but the most impressive part of this chip is that it can run ATI and NVIDIA cards together on one motherboard at the same time!
Indeed, the Big Bang was shown running at MSI's stand with a 4890 and GTX260, with the Hydra performing as middleman between both of them, balancing tasks and distributing workloads. While the performance increase (or decrease, or whichever we find) won't be known until we get a review sample to test, it's an exciting new technology.
Also shown at the MSI stand was a dual-LCD tablet that folds with a central hinge to form a book, which was running Windows 7 almost effortlessly. There's plenty to look at, so jump into the gallery of pics to see more of MSI at CES 2010.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012