At CEBIT 2010, MSI is showing an AMD 870 based motherboard with the Lucid HYDRA chip. Lucid is a chip designer company with funding from Intel. The Hydra chip is an independent solution to allow multiple GPUs to render scenes in games. This means that you are no longer dependent on SLI from NVidia or Crossfire from ATI.
In the past, there seems to have been a lot of problems with the chip. Well, perhaps the problems were not with the hardware side of the chip, but with the software side of things. It has been almost two months since we have seen anything on the HYDRA chip, so perhaps many of the software issues have been solved.
The AM3 socket is powered by a 10-phase DrMOS based VRM. The CPU connects to four DDR3 DIMM slots for dual-channel memory. It connects to the AMD 870 northbridge over the HyperTransport 3.0 interface. Its lone PCI-E 2.0 x16 port is taken up by the Hydra Engine chip located between the two PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots. Other expansion slots include three PCI-E x1, and one PCI.
Will the hydra have better performance then crossfire? Which Hydra chip will it have?