MSI Big Bang with the Lucid Hydra chip Posted on 12/08/2009 at 12:35 by Marc
IOPanel has just published photos of the forthcoming P55 Express from MSI, the Big Bang. The particularity of this card is that it has an additional chip manufactured by Lucid that is positioned between the processor’s inbuilt northbridge and the card’s three PCI Express x16 slots.
This Israeli startup in which Intel has invested, is proud of being able to use its Hydra Engine technology to combine the performance of several graphics chips. The chip seems to be a 200 series Hydra, though this hasn’t yet been announced.
It remains to be seen if the chip integrated in the MSI Big Bang will indeed work towards this goal: in fact with P55, SLI and CrossFire is already supported and the only real interest of this sort of solution – if it does indeed really work – will be to pair up AMD and NVIDIA chips, something that you can’t currently do. The chip may for example be used as a multiplier for PCI-Express lanes, as is already the case with the nForce 200 for example. Anyway, let’s hold our horses until further proof!
