Multi-brand GPU mayhem likely

ATI + Nvidia = Lucidlogix

By Paul Taylor: Wednesday, 16 July 2008, 12:44 PM

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ISRAELI OUTFIT LUCIDLOGIX Technologies is touting its brand-spanking-new Hydra Engine technology that will allow cross-branded GPUs to operate hand-in-hand. Sounds grand, doesn’t it?

This market-shaking feat is performed with the use of a dedicated SoC, dubbed the Hydra Engine, which distributes processing tasks to different GPUs and optimises data flow to and from each one, maximising (in theory) the potential performance per GPU. The firm uses some nifty data compression/decompression algorithms to simplify things, it says, in a cost-effective manner (although, as we all know, GPU economics reside in the Twilight Zone).

The claim is quite grand, as it states that this will allow you to throw a bunch of different graphics cards into the mix and get “near-linear to above-linear performance” across different GPUs. The Hydra Engine analyses and adapts on-the-fly to feed each GPU, creating parallel processing engines under any CPU, chipset and GPU combo.

A simple graph on the site shows several graphics cards wearing green and red colours (nudge nudge wink wink) fed by the Hydra Engine and outputting to a display. It’s pretty vague, if you ask us, especially since they don’t mention if you can combine the processing power of the GPUs.

As the technology is described as a “real time distributed processing engine”, and if their idea of distribution is anywhere close to CPU load balancing, it’s likely to be just distributing processes to the idlest GPU available. We don’t expect Hydra to SLI/Crossfire ATI and Nvidia GPUs into a single graphics processing behemoth, but rather keep things nice and tidy within the data path.

We called them up to get some clarification, but the prez was already on the phone with another inquisitive hack and was getting back to us “as soon as possible”. We’re waiting for that call.

In the meantime you can see that parallel processing is becoming big, both on CPUs and GPUs, and that a device of this nature could do a lot more than just improve “gaming” and “office computing”. We’re sure render farms would be more than happy to tap into this technology... and we’re quite sure there’s even a place for the IP within Intel’s own Larrabee or AMD’s Fusion.

Getting back to the details: the Hydra Engine can be soldered onto the motherboard or slotted as an add-in board, depending on what each partner will want to do. The technology will support OpenGL and DirectX and should be available through a number of said partners in early 2009.

If the firm isn’t gobbled up in the meantime, that is. Guess which chip maker has a stake through the company right now. Yeah, the one beginning with I. µ