半导体行业观察·2025-07-23 00:53Core Viewpoint - The article discusses the emergence of Bolt Graphics, a startup aiming to redefine the GPU landscape with its new GPU called Zeus, which focuses on path tracing technology to challenge established giants like NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel [1][19]. Group 1: Path Tracing as a Breakthrough - Path tracing represents a significant advancement in rendering technology, providing a more accurate representation of light behavior compared to traditional real-time ray tracing [2]. - The computational demands of path tracing are substantially higher, requiring ten to a hundred times the power of standard GPUs for real-time applications [2]. Group 2: Bolt Graphics and Zeus GPU - Bolt Graphics was founded by engineers from major companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel, with a mission to create a high-performance path tracing GPU [7]. - The Zeus GPU comes in three versions: Zeus 1c, Zeus 2c, and Zeus 4c, with varying power and performance specifications, including a path tracing performance of approximately 7.7 billion rays per second for the 1c version [7][8]. - The Zeus 4c version is designed for data centers, featuring a TDP of 500W and up to 2TB of DDR5 memory, aimed at high-performance computing (HPC) and rendering farms [8][10]. Group 3: Advantages of Zeus - Zeus GPUs utilize a unique memory architecture combining LPDDR5X for bandwidth and DDR5 for capacity, allowing for a total memory of up to 2.25TB, which is beneficial for both path tracing and HPC datasets [10]. - In terms of performance, Bolt claims that their GPUs can outperform NVIDIA's RTX 5090 by a factor of 10 in certain scenarios, significantly reducing the number of GPUs needed for complex rendering tasks [10][11]. Group 4: Ecosystem Development - Bolt is building an open and customizable ecosystem based on RISC-V architecture, which allows for greater flexibility and community engagement compared to traditional closed architectures [14]. - The company is developing a proprietary path tracing engine called Glow Stick, which aims to integrate with popular rendering tools and provide high-precision sampling and physical Monte Carlo integration [15][16]. Group 5: Challenges and Future Outlook - Despite its potential, Bolt faces significant challenges, including the timeline for mass production, which is projected for late 2026, and the need to establish a robust software ecosystem to support its hardware [17][18]. - The success of Bolt's Zeus GPU could redefine the graphics rendering landscape, particularly in gaming and HPC applications, if it can deliver on its promises of unprecedented visual fidelity and performance [19].