Posted on Wednesday, January 03 2007 @ 1:08 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Intel, along with Giza Venture Capital and Genesis Partners, invested
$12 million in a startup called Lucid Information Technology. This company is working on a traffic organizing chip to offer graphics acceleration for up to four GPUs simultaneously.
Lucid's chip is mainly targeted at the gaming computer industry. The company estimates that PCs consume at least 60 million GPUs annually, while new games demand more computation than a single GPU can provide. The chip acts like a hub connecting the main processor to the multiple graphics processors, serving as a traffic cop. One part of it is a chip situated between the two units, and the other part is a software driver, that now supports Windows. The chip helps divide the graphics processing work among several GPUs, while the driver helps makes the application indifferent to the graphics processors in use.
Lucid plans to have working samples by the end of 2007 and wants to sell it to large motherboard manufacturers like Asus, Leadtek and Gigabyte and system integrators such as Dell and Alienware.
