Nvidia Quash MSI's Lucid powered 'Big Bang' Board
"MSI's expected launch of a Lucid powered board has been pushed back, and they have now released a P55 board with NVIDIA's NF200 chip, enabling 3-card SLI instead"
Published: 5th November 2009 | Source: SemiAccurate |
Nvidia quash MSI's Lucid powered ‘Big Bang’ board
Taken from Lucid’s official site, ‘Lucid is a fabless semiconductor company that has developed a unique universal multi-GPU solution. The company took a fresh approach to scaling graphics rendering by engineering a real-time distributed processing engine (system-on-a-chip) that allows efficient load-balancing of multi-GPU environments using any GPU vendor.’The jolly green giant, NVIDIA really don’t like that. With little to show their investors and even more delays to their GT300 ‘Fermi’ cards, any losses in their ‘SLI tax’ racket would really sting. Because of that they have claimed they will break support for Lucid’s chip at the driver level, and by unknown means coerced board makers Micro-Star International (MSI) into postponing their ‘Big Bang’ motherboard, which features a Lucid Hydra 200 processor taking care of the PCI-Express graphics subsystem. You can see the chip between the CPU socket and the first PCI-E slot in the picture.
I'm retracting this statement as I have been informed by my superiors that the Trinergy board was demoed at Cebit, here is an official statement by MSI's Garret Wu:
“The MSI P55 Big Bang with NVIDIA NF200 was already planned in December 2008, almost one year ago. MSI showcased this board on Cebit 2009 which was reported by many media like http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?id=24935&catid=2 and there are also photos which show very clearly the NF200 chip:http://images.hardware.info/news/cebit-day2-23.jpg. MSI Big Bang Trinergy (NF200) is already announced and will go into mass production by the end of November.
The MSI Big Bang Fuzion (Hydra 200) hardware is ready. Currently Lucid is optimizing the driver for Windows 7 so that it works stable and in all configurations (Including Mix & Match mode). Because MSI is dedicated to bring high quality and stable product on the market we decided to postpone the Big Bang Fuzion (Hydra 200) pending the MSI internal qualification assurance test. The Big Bang Fuzion (Hydra 200) will be released when it’s driver is finished which is most likely Q1 2010.”
This update casts a different light on the article and hopefully MSI/NVIDIA haven't been too upset by my post. See my official apology at the bottom of the article.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out; hopefully MSI can bring out their Lucid-Based board. If it all goes to plan then we should be seeing Lucid boards appearing early next year, fingers crossed, as it sounds like the Lucid board is in testing at MSI right now.
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Edit/Apology: It seems in my rush to get this article out nice and early for all of our readers, I made a beginners mistake (remember I've only been at this for a couple of weeks) and missed out a few important steps in the process.
I would like to officially apologize to SemiAccurate, my initial source for the article, and NVIDIA and MSI for my misinformed statements which cast them in a bad light. My sincerest apologies guys, I hope I haven't offended you - Alex Myers
Most Recent Comments
I hope the EU bring them up for this. They should'nt be allowed to do this sort of thing.
With little to show their investors and even more delays to their GT300 ‘Fermi’ cards,
.. apart from published profits for Q3 2009.
These "delays" we keep hearing of are "reported" delays of dates no1 ever had.
We don't want a TheInquirer situation, turning up on OC3D.
Its definately them trying to cover losses from the GT300 farse.
C'mon Tom, this is getting to be a joke.
Well it seems like there were a few discrepanies in my article, and a few people really haven't been too pleased so I have edited the article with more information and an official apology to SemiAccurate, MSI and NVIDIA. Hopefully they will be a bit happier with the piece now.
I guess this was to be expected really, you saw this first at OC3D, the new home of hard hitting tech journalism... Enjoy guys.
I guess this was to be expected really, you saw this first at OC3D, the new home of hard hitting tech journalism... Enjoy guys.
I don't think I'd make any bones about appologizing to SemiAccurate. Afaik it's most made up of those who left TheInquirer, by choice or not.
The thing is the title of the section is called "News". If we had a "make it up as we go along cos there's no news about" section, OC3D could put similar stuff in there.
I'd not personally want OC3D to be part of the 'news' creation business, more or the news reporting. There are already too many sites like it already, once the 1 made up article is linked to and quoted by other sites they suddenly become fact and u get statements like the above from Tom. "GF300 farce" ?
The thing is the title of the section is called "News". If we had a "make it up as we go along cos there's no news about" section, OC3D could put similar stuff in there.
I'd not personally want OC3D to be part of the 'news' creation business, more or the news reporting. There are already too many sites like it already, once the 1 made up article is linked to and quoted by other sites they suddenly become fact and u get statements like the above from Tom. "GF300 farce" ?
That looks more promising , but is Nvidia still going to stop the LKucid chip from working via their driver? I am waiting to se how this Lucid chip pans out and if its as good as they say and we can mix our GPU's then I will get a board with a Lucid chip on it so I can use my GTX280 with my 8800GTX.
Stupid decision from Nvidia really, the Hydra is a good solution, more people will buy Nvidia cards to go with existing ones. Shot themselves in the foot again.
Shot themselves in the foot again.
Eh ?
Eh ?
pete is sayin rast! that more people would of gone out to buy lower spec nvidia cards to put in with their bigboys, but i think nvidia see past this and are thinkin they will not make so much dosh out of their higher spec cards
eg.
with hydra gtx285 + 8800gt
without hydra gtx285+gtx285 = more cash for nvidia!
@ pete i dont think nvidia see it as shootin themselves in the foot!
Neither do I, I saw their financial figures last thursday.
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