INTEL & Friends sounds a bit corny doesn't it? C'mon, you know INTEL has no friends. But when it needs something to come out well, it does what every IT giant should do. Every alliance (excepting perhaps one with its sworn enemy AMD) is good as long as it delivers. And this time INTEL wants to enter the multi-GPU business.

Israeli graphics company Lucid Information Technology Ltd has received funds of about 12 million dollars for research and development. The $12 million is funded by INTEL and other partners including Genesis and Giza Venture Capital. In case the name sounds unknown (and that's no problem since the company itself is rather new) Lucid Information Technology is a small company that employs 27 workers currently and works on designs that regard functional multi-GPU architectures.

Although small, Lucid has great ambitions and is currently developing a graphics acceleration traffic organizing chip based on a SoC design. As a result, the company hopes that it will possess a functional chip able to provide enough bandwidth for 4 GPUs on the same board.

The traffic organizing chip is supposed to take care of the data transfer between the 4 GPUs and the CPU (the flow will be hardware controlled) while a specially written driver will split the work load across the GPUs allowing for a dynamic load of each core. The advantage of such a technology is that the operating system will see the multiple GPU array as a single graphics device when the proper driver is installed. Of course, the applications of such a device could take SLI and Crossfire off the market.

Lucid expects that it will have a working and ready-to-manufacture design by the end of this year and they have already shipped a few processors based on its designs as GPGPUs (general purpose processors). All things taken into account, the idea is great, but what does is have to do with INTEL? Your guess is as good as mine in this case.