New Intel x58's may have Hydra chip

[Priv]

Which in turn would encourage the GPU companies to work harder on new products! More tasty GPU's for us!

On the other hand, if they would no longer make those huge power hungry beasts the budget cards will most likely become more expensive as those will now be top of the line.

 

[Blazing fire]

What kind of architecture does this chip have which makes it so powerful? Cell? Grid? Parallel, whatever those means?

 

[Neural Net]

What kind of architecture does this chip have which makes it so powerful? Cell? Grid? Parallel, whatever those means?

It's not really the hardware that's amazing, it's the software. The code is supposed to be pretty incredible as it doesn't need game or driver support, yet adds little to no overhead. If Nvidia or ATI could do this, they would have done it sometime ago - using it to drive many smaller cheaper less powerful GPUs to do the job of one more expensive GPU.

 

[Neuromancer]

Multi vendor gpu scaling will not happen until at least windows 7 and maybe not until later.

Vista does not support Heterozygous display drivers like XP, I am not sure if 7 will or not.

I will leave this for early adopters too, as this is going to have ALL kinds of problems with older games for sure...

 

[Neural Net]

Multi vendor gpu scaling will not happen until at least windows 7 and maybe not until later.

Vista does not support Heterozygous display drivers like XP, I am not sure if 7 will or not.

I will leave this for early adopters too, as this is going to have ALL kinds of problems with older games for sure...

Interesting, didn't know XP could do that. Anyone know why it was taken out of Vista?

 

[Blackcoog]

If you run one X2 card would this chip have any affect or does the integration onto one card already have a controller that is better than running two single cards?

If this is true, it would suck to have been one of those early adopters of i7 that run multi-GPU setups

Depends, most people that run higher end multi-GPU setups probably won't be scared of purchasing another motherboard for $300 when they already dumped $1k or more into high end cards.

 

[Parad0x420]

If you check out the AM3 MB section i posted a link to XS that describes the hydra engine possibly in the sb850 chipset

 

[deathman20]

Multi vendor gpu scaling will not happen until at least windows 7 and maybe not until later.

Vista does not support Heterozygous display drivers like XP, I am not sure if 7 will or not.

I will leave this for early adopters too, as this is going to have ALL kinds of problems with older games for sure...

Vista is a no
Win7 is a no
XP has to be a no. Reason why I say this is because the company said that it could in use 2 different drivers to combine say ATI/nVidia cards but it hasn't been done yet.

Non of MS's driver models allow for more than 2 drivers to be installed at the same time. I think part of the issue is the DirectX limiting it as well.

 

[jason4207]

I hope to see this product hit the market, but I'm very skeptical.

 

[Neural Net]

Vista is a no
Win7 is a no
XP has to be a no. Reason why I say this is because the company said that it could in use 2 different drivers to combine say ATI/nVidia cards but it hasn't been done yet.

Non of MS's driver models allow for more than 2 drivers to be installed at the same time. I think part of the issue is the DirectX limiting it as well.

Won't matter too much in the end if the competition between Nvidia and ATI keeps up like it is.

 

[Neuromancer]

Vista is a no
Win7 is a no
XP has to be a no. Reason why I say this is because the company said that it could in use 2 different drivers to combine say ATI/nVidia cards but it hasn't been done yet.

Non of MS's driver models allow for more than 2 drivers to be installed at the same time. I think part of the issue is the DirectX limiting it as well.

I ran ATI and nVidia cards in XP so XP definitly a yes.

Have not tried it in Vista but was told no it cant be done

I actually wondered why people said to reinstall XP if you were switching video card brand names, because I used to have 2 seperate GPUs running all the time (hell I had 3 differnet GPUs running bakc in the day when I had 5 monitors running)





As for why did they implement the new driver model in Vista? Stability.
Notice the large lack of BSOD posts concerning Vista vice XP? The only ones I can recall occurring with Vista were all boot related not within the OS, boot related were all OCing or raid related (well not true, I have had overclocking related BSODs in Vista)

 

[Shiggity]

Vista is a no
Win7 is a no
XP has to be a no. Reason why I say this is because the company said that it could in use 2 different drivers to combine say ATI/nVidia cards but it hasn't been done yet.

Non of MS's driver models allow for more than 2 drivers to be installed at the same time. I think part of the issue is the DirectX limiting it as well.

XP -> yes

Vista -> No

Win7 -> Yes (I'm almost 100% sure on this)

Vista not having one is one of the key reasons I disliked it at first.

 

[Neural Net]

XP -> yes

Vista -> No

Win7 -> Yes (I'm almost 100% sure on this)

Vista not having one is one of the key reasons I disliked it at first.

Interesting, have you tried it in the beta or something?

 

[Blazing fire]

Without asking me to google/wiki, what is Heterozygous?

 

[Kuroimaho]

Good. When hydra first made some noise I was wondering why wouldn't intel buy them.

Then I realized AMD can't even pay pension for their workers not to mention buy another company, and likely they wouldn't want nvidia support in their dragon platform.
Nvidia likely to want to keep ati cards of their mobos, if anyone still wants to buy their hot chipsets.

So the real winner of hydra is Intel and here it comes to Intel mobos.

 

[Neural Net]

Good. When hydra first made some noise I was wondering why wouldn't intel buy them.

Then I realized AMD can't even pay pension for their workers not to mention buy another company, and likely they wouldn't want nvidia support in their dragon platform.
Nvidia likely to want to keep ati cards of their mobos, if anyone still wants to buy their hot chipsets.

So the real winner of hydra is Intel and here it comes to Intel mobos.

Well now that X58 boards support SLI and Crossfire, isn't Nvidia's motherboard business essentially dead? If Intel uses the Hydra chip I expect Nvidia to get into quite a hissy fit about this.

If either Nvidia or ATI bought this company it would have been a sound investment, even now. Imagine just making a multicore GPU with relatively low performance cores, with 100% scaling - even a quad core 4670 GPU would thrash a GTX280. The potential gains across the board are phenomenal.

It'll be like 3DFX Voodoo all over again. But better.

 

[deathman20]

Didn't know that about XP and driver models. Does that apply to XP-64bit?

Well now that X58 boards support SLI and Crossfire, isn't Nvidia's motherboard business essentially dead? If Intel uses the Hydra chip I expect Nvidia to get into quite a hissy fit about this.

If either Nvidia or ATI bought this company it would have been a sound investment, even now. Imagine just making a multicore GPU with relatively low performance cores, with 100% scaling - even a quad core 4670 GPU would thrash a GTX280. The potential gains across the board are phenomenal.

It'll be like 3DFX Voodoo all over again. But better.

Don't know if nVidia would be in a hissy fit per say, since mobo makers are being charged extra for the option to allow SLI on there boards via special bios's.

But yes if they bought them out it would be a vast investment. Small cheap cores with extremely high yields = one hell of a board. Heck even if a core is bad and has to run at a lower speed it could still run with the board it would be just in slower chip class is all.

 

[Neural Net]

Don't know if nVidia would be in a hissy fit per say, since mobo makers are being charged extra for the option to allow SLI on there boards via special bios's.

But yes if they bought them out it would be a vast investment. Small cheap cores with extremely high yields = one hell of a board. Heck even if a core is bad and has to run at a lower speed it could still run with the board it would be just in slower chip class is all.

I reckon Nvidia will never allow anything other than SLI to use two of its cards at once - which would be a mistake IMO. Intel having an interest in this product could be a boon for ATI as well as itself.

As for a graphics card with the tech built in, the only hurdles I could think of would be the way memory is handled and the size of the PCB. Technically I'm not sure how a multicore GPU would access memory, if it's like current setups then it may be too expensive to provide enough memory to each core, both in terms of cost and size of the PCB. That's unless it would work like a pool, and each core would just take what it needed. I remember there were rumours of the 4870X2 doing that.

 

[Shiggity]

I reckon Nvidia will never allow anything other than SLI to use two of its cards at once - which would be a mistake IMO. Intel having an interest in this product could be a boon for ATI as well as itself.

I agree, Intel is coming out with Larrabee so if that gets perfect scaling, it will just make Nvidia look worse.

Intel is getting pretty serious about graphics it looks like.

 

[Shiggity]

As for a graphics card with the tech built in, the only hurdles I could think of would be the way memory is handled and the size of the PCB. Technically I'm not sure how a multicore GPU would access memory, if it's like current setups then it may be too expensive to provide enough memory to each core, both in terms of cost and size of the PCB. That's unless it would work like a pool, and each core would just take what it needed. I remember there were rumours of the 4870X2 doing that.

That is how it worked. I posted a link to a screenshot of the memory system on Larabee and it was kinda complicated. It has a shared cache type memory subsystem with multiple ring busses going around.

http://www.ocforums.com/showpost.php?p=5922727&postcount=1