startupmania

LucidLogix, based out of Kfar Netter and founded by Offir Remez and Dr. Reuven Bakalash, have announce a fourth round $8 million fund raising.

This last round brings the total investment in the company since its founding to $40 million, all through the company’s investors: American-Canadian investment fund Rho Ventures as well as the Israeli Giza and Genesis. The company made no comment as to any investments by Intel Capital, a previous investor.

LucidLogicx, which employs about 60 employees, is managed by Moshe Steiner, and is trying to end the unstandardized qualities of the different GPUs on the market, and allow all GPUs, from any company, to play nicely with each other. The company is developing a hardware chip calle Hydra, that will be placed between the CPU and GPU.

“Lucid is going through a natural, positive maturation from a technology development company to one who manufactures, markets and sells computer chips,” says Offir Remez, President of Lucid. “We are working with strategic clients that are leading the global PC market and a separate financial backing allows us to achieve our goals.”

When examining Lucid’s proposal, one must remember that the video acceleration card is the most expensive component in modern computers, and when purchasing a quality 3D-capable computer, whether for work or play, half (or more) of the cost will go towards the GPU.

The Hydra Chip

The world of graphic acceleration is ruled by several big companies, namely AMD, Intel, nVidia and ATI. The problem is that PCs, whether desktop or portable, cannot join more than one brand and utilize the computational capabilities together. Once your GPU has aged beyond your needs, and cannot provide you with the computational power that new applications demand, it is nearly impossible to upgrade it or to add another, cheaper GPU from a different company, to help carry the load.

Even if a supplier (such as HP, Dell or Lenovo) is interested in putting together a supercomputer which makes use of several graphic processors (Heterogeneous GPU Cluster), and allow the end-user to enjoy an improved cost-to-use ratio, they are in a real problem as the different GPUs are simply not planned to work in parallel and share resources with those of other manufacturers. The world of graphic processors is one which is in a constant state of unstandardization, and if you should purchase a high-end GPU, it better provide anything you need, on its own, for the next year or two.

Lucid’s Hydra chip can function as a separate component for existing computing hardware, or as an OEM component on the motherboard, such as the one LucidLogix is pushing with the Taiwanese hardware company MSI. It’s interesting to see if LucidLogix will be able to see one of the big-name computer suppliers, such as HP, Dell or Lenovo, to use their technologies in order to build heterogenic processing capabilities for the 3D market. Furthermore, it will be interesting to see if LucidLogix’s technology will indeed provide a significant cost-to-benefit advantage or if their enormous efforts will become irrelevant in light of a single hardware offering by one of the global giants, which may offer a stronger 3D processing power, for a significantly lower price.

Translated by Itai Rosenbaum