Bolt Graphics is a new computer graphics hardware startup based out of Sunnyvale, California. This company wants to shake things up in the consumer graphics hardware market with a brand-new, grounds-up graphics architecture for graphics rendering, gaming, and HPC. What makes this startup unique and refreshing is that its architecture, or at least the marketing material of it, doesn't use the most uttered two-letter acronym in human history.

Called ZEUS by Bolt Graphics, the architecture offers a contemporary raster 3D graphics, ray tracing, and path tracing hardware pipeline, using an in-house designed SIMD architecture that's controlled by a RISC-V command processor that doubles up as a CPU. The prototype graphics card features a PCI-Express 5.0 x16 host interface, and LPDDR5X as its graphics memory, with additional DDR5 SODIMM slots for the RISC-V command processor. Together, the board can have up to 384 GB of memory to deal with large data sets. The card also features a 400 Gbps or 800 Gbps enterprise network interface, and a fully-fledged BMC/IPMI circuit on board, so you can manage large clusters of the card in a rackmount render server or workstation. The most surprising aspect of the card is power, and it only features an 8-pin PCIe power input, for a total of 225 W of power draw.