We had an interesting meeting with the president and CIO of Lucid, a company that gained a lot of attention at IDF 2008. Lucid promises a small chip that can make your two GPU scale almost linear. After a long discussion we learned that Linear is almost linear, and that linear is best case scenario and that real world performance should be close to linear.
This would mean that two GPUs, let's say in SLI or Crossfire, powered by Lucid chip and driver, could score close to 100 percent faster than a single GPU. Let's say that if a single GPU would score 100 FPS in one game, two would score close to 200FPS.
The chips that will find their place in both motherboards and graphics cards will appear on the market in 2H 2009. The prototypes are already finished, but the company didn't want to talk about any specific partners.
Anyone who has a PLX chip that makes two cards run together could be Lucid’s potential customer, and obviously some guys are interested. This leaves a lot of unclear questions to be answered, as we suspect that both ATI and Nvidia might have something against a chip that makes SLI and Crossfire look like child's play, and that this could lead to a driver that will block Lucid’s ability to shine.
We don’t want to talk about moral dilemmas, but we suspect that this might be the case. Lucid promised to show us a demo in the near future and we believe that Intel is keeping an eye on Lucid for its Larrabee school science project.
