Last year Lucid announced the Hydra 100, a physical chip that could enable hardware multi-GPU without any SLI/Crossfire software. It sounds a great invention, at least on paper. The company has just announced at IDF that they’ve finished the development of the final set, and will deliver it within the next 30 days, according to AnandTech.

MSI Big Bang P55 motherboard with Hydra 200

As we reported, MSI’s Big Bang P55 motherboard has taken advantage of the Hydra 200 chip. Unlike the Hydra 100, 200 is built on a 65nm process node instead of 130nm and will be available in three versions: the LT22114, the LT22102 and the LT22114. The only difference between the chips are the number of PCIe lanes. The lowest end chip has a x8 connection to the CPU/PCIe controller and two x8 connections to GPUs. The mid-range LT22102 has a x16 connection to the CPU and two x16 connections for GPUs. And the highest end solution, the one used on the MSI board, has a x16 to the CPU and then a configurable pair of x16s to GPUs. You can operate this controller in 4 x8 mode, 1 x16 + 2 x8 or 2 x16. The high-end product will be launching in October, with the other two versions shipping sometime later.

Lucid claims the Hydra 200 chip has a TDP of 6W.

Lucid wouldn’t disclose the added cost on a motherboard, but each PCIe lane costs around $1.50. The high-end chip has 48 PCIe lanes in total, which puts the premium at $72. The low-end chip has 24 lanes, translating into a $36 cost for the Hydra 200 chip. Since the Hydra 200 has an integrated PCIe switch, there is no need for extra chips, and of course no SLI licensing fees.

GeForce GTX 260 & ATI Radeon HD 4890 running in multi-GPU
mode

You may enable/disable multi-GPU mode

NVIDIA and ATI running in multi-GPU mode on a single system

Lucid only had two games installed on the cross-vendor GPU setup: Bioshock and FEAR 2. Anyway, we can tell the system at least works.