Many people have heard of Lucid Technologies Hydra chip. Most have discounted it as vapor ware or nothing more than an interesting demo.

They cited a lack of any real adoption of this chip into any existing product. Well those doubters will not have much of an argument anymore.

Microstar International has announced that they are going to put a Lucid Hydra on to an upcoming P55 board for the Core i5. The board will be dubbed the "Big Bang". The MSI Big Bang will join ELSA's HPC rack system that also utilizes Hydra.

According to Lucid by using the Hydra you can achieve an almost linear scaling by adding multiple GPUs. The technology does not use the standard AFR or even ALR. Instead it dynamically allocates the render load across the GPUs.

Also unlike SLI and Crossfire you do not need identical GPUs you, in threory, could even use one GPU from ATi and one from nVidia.

We will be keeping an eye open for this new board to hit so we can see what it can really do.

Source