Lucid's Multi-GPU Wonder: More Information on the Hydra 100
by Derek Wilson on August 22, 2008 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Let's Talk About Applications
Obviously it'll accelerate games. What about GPGPU? That's not the focus of Lucid right now. They said they want to look at the largest market for the part and target that first, and gaming is certainly where that is at. It is physically possible that the hardware and software could load balance other tasks across the hardware, but this isn't something that is currently being explored or developed.
It will also accelerate games using multiple GPUs while outputting to multiple displays. Imagine 4 GPUs sharing the load over 3 monitors for a flight sim. Neither NVIDIA nor AMD can pull something like this off right now with their technology.
This can end up on both GPUs and on motherboards, and they can be cascaded. There is a limit to how many you can cascade because you will start introducing latency (but Lucid didn't define that limit). But 1 level deep is reasonable apparently. And this means it seems like it would be possible (except for the power requirements) to build a motherboard with 4 slots that had 4 cards each with 2 GPUs (let's say GTX 280s) connected by a Hyrda 100 chip.
And if scaling is really linear, 8x GTX 280 would certainly deliver way more than we could possibly need for a pretty good while. We'd be CPU and system limited until the cows come home (or at least a good 2 or 3 generations of hardware out into the future). Well, either that or developers would catch on that they could allow ridiculous features to be enabled for the kind of super ultra mega (filthy rich) users that would pick up such a crazy solution.
Upgrading hardware would be stupidly simple. Forget PhysX or anything like that: leave your older card in the system and upgrade to the latest generation and they'll both contribute equally to the rendering of frames (and since graphics is usually the largest bottleneck in the system, this will improve performance more than any other solution anyway). If we added a GTX 280 to a card with half it's performance, we'd see a 50% performance improvement over a single GTX 280. Not bad at all. There would be less downside in buying a high end part because it could continue to serve you for much longer than usual. And low end parts would still contribute as well (with a proportionally smaller gain, but a gain nonetheless).
Lucid also makes what seems like a ridiculous claim. They say that in some cases they could see higher than linear scaling. The reason they claim this should be possible is that the CPU will be offloaded by their hardware and doesn't need to worry about as much so that overall system performance will go up. We sort of doubt this, and hearing such claims makes us nervous. They did state that this was not the norm, but rather the exception. If it happens at all it would have to be the exception, but it still seems way too out there for me to buy it.
Aside from utterly invalidating SLI and CrossFire, this thing opens up a whole realm of possibilities. If Intel adopts it for their high end motherboards, they would have the ultimate solution for gaming. Period. If it's up to board vendors, chipset will still be less relevant in at least multi-GPU performance than the inclusion or exclusion of the Lucid Hydra 100.
But can they really do it? And how do they even attempt to do it? They've told us a little bit, and we'll brainstorm a bit and see what we can come up with.
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Spivonious - Monday, August 25, 2008 - link
I don't think nVidia or AMD will try to force Lucid out of the market. If I can actually get a 100% increase in performance from purchasing a second video card, I will.This chip only means more sales for nVidia and AMD.
7Enigma - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - link
But that doesn't help their bottom line in the end. Right now CF and SLI are not very popular due to their scaling and custom profile issues. Because of that, many people spring for the highest priced single card they can afford. This keeps the market segment basically tiered the way any business would like. You have low end parts, mid-grade, and uber parts.Now throw in the possibility that this Hydra chip works as specified. That 3 tier system just fell apart. When you look at most of the non-mainstream parts from both sides (for example Nvidia's 280, 200, and say 9800/8800GTS), you'll notice that while the price of those chips are drastically different, the performance is not near as different. This makes sense from an R&D standpoint to recoup costs, but from a logical standpoint shelling out $650 for the 280 when it debuted WOULD NOT make sense if 2 200's or 2 9800's was significantly faster for the same or less total $$$.
That's why both ATI/AMD and Nvidia don't want them in the market. It destroys the pricing structure, and would place much more influence on the bang for the buck part (currently this would hurt Nvidia with their 280 and favor slightly ATI/AMD with their cheaper 4870 and 4850).
Why would I spend twice as much for a 30% increase in performance with a top of the line single card solution, when I could just get two of the cheaper version for a near 60% increase over the single top card (using general performance of the latest cards)? Sure I'd need a board to support it, but it would make the SLI/CF mobo's MUCH MUCH more attractive then they currently are (I have no plans to purchase a dual-slot mobo with my upcoming build....unless we can get some actual data before Jan09...not likely).
jnanster - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - link
This is terrible!I was all set to buy a new system in a few months.
Now I have to wait again, again.
shin0bi272 - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 - link
lol sorry dude... but hey this way you can wait for 8 core nehalem cpus too.TheDoc9 - Monday, August 25, 2008 - link
This article reads like the same sort of hype-machine dribble that many of the dot-com wonder companies used before the 2001 collapse so they could get investors interested.The writer of this piece is fortunately skeptical and he should be, more so even. I hope I'm wrong and we see this technology in a year or so, but it reminds me of Constellation 3D.
shin0bi272 - Sunday, August 24, 2008 - link
The way they outlined it in one of their diagrams is, an instruction which usually goes from the cpu to the northbridge to the gpus and then the gpu's sort out which card should render the command. The Hydra changes that to, cpu to northbridge to hydra to which ever gpu is ready for a new instruction. Which means its essentially taking the place of the little bridge between the gpus and the chip that makes the decision on which card is rendering the scene.Nvidia and AMD could have put a chip like this on their motherboards yeah but then you wouldn't need to buy 2 of the same card (and it would possibly work for the competitors card too like the hydra does). Nvidia never tried a motherboard chip to my knowledge and ati did at one time do a y cable and software controlled card selection. But I dont believe that they had a chip on the motherboard either. That reminds me of the difference between a software raid5 card and a hardware raid5 card. The hardware raid card has much better performance but it costs 3x as much. Cost could still be a factor with this chip too. I mean if it ads an extra 20 or 50 dollars to a motherboard gamers will have no problem with that. But if its an extra 200 dollars would they? Gotta make back all that R&D money somehow even if Intel backed them.
Another question is will this solution require a multi y-cable type device like ati used to do? If the different cards are rendering the scene at different times it would stand to reason. Or will one card be designated as the output card and all finished scenes be sent to that card? That would probably be a bad idea latency wise but who wants to buy a 4way y-split cable? Then again if im going to get linear performance out of sli I can spring for a cable. Could even make a 4 way hub sort of device so that all of the cards would feed into it and then one into the monitor. Could also do a multi-in and multi-out hub to do multiple monitors (though you might not need to do that it could be easier to add and subtract monitors with one).
computerfarmer - Sunday, August 24, 2008 - link
It is nice to here about new products. I hope to see this work.I am still waiting for the AMD 790GX/SB750 review.
MamiyaOtaru - Sunday, August 24, 2008 - link
What are the odds this will be cross platform? If it relies on drivers for doing a lot of stuff odds are it will not be, which would make it a nonstarter for me. And yes I know close to no one cares ;) I do though and I'd be interested to know.metro15 - Sunday, August 24, 2008 - link
hey. they do not need any motherboard manufacturer. Imagine a Intel Labaree graphic card with many cores synchronized with Lucid chip. The performance would be unbeatable.pool1892 - Sunday, August 24, 2008 - link
larrabee does not need hydra. it will reconfigure itself to suit the load. and with something like larrabee gen2 it will have qpi, which results in much lower latencies and much higher bandwidth.larrabee could even achieve more than linear skaling. (theoretically more cores could result in less context changes, which means more cache hits and less waiting cycles - this will of course not happen in reality)