Bolt Graphics presents Zeus: Marketing or technological revolution?

Start-ups making ambitious promises is nothing new. But what Bolt Graphics has now announced with “Zeus” is so ambitious that even industry giants such as NVIDIA or AMD are likely to be amazed – or rather smile. A GPU that is supposed to outperform an RTX 5090 by a factor of ten and consume less energy than some laptop chips? That sounds more like a PR stunt than a genuine market innovation.

Source. Bolt Graphics

Technical specifications: A marvel or a pipe dream?

According to Bolt Graphics, Zeus will be released in three variants:

• Single-chiplet with 77 Gigarays and 128 MB on-chip cache
• Dual-chiplet with 154 gigarays and 256 MB cache
• Quad-chiplet with 307 Gigarays and 512 MB cache

The TDP values are between 120W and 500W, and the RAM can be expanded to up to 384 GB using two DDR5 SODIMMs. This modularity would be a novelty for gaming graphics cards, but it remains to be seen whether this will prevail in practice.

Particularly bizarre: Zeus supposedly comes with an RJ-45 LAN connection. A graphics card with an Ethernet port? Why exactly this should be necessary remains unclear.

Source. Bolt Graphics

Performance data: Realistic or pure wishful thinking?

Bolt Graphics’ performance promises are the real sticking point:

• 10x RTX 5090 performance in rendering workloads
• 12x FP64 HPC performance
• 300x EM simulation performance compared to NVIDIA’s Blackwell B200

However, these values come from “pre-Silicon benchmarks in emulation”, i.e. simulations that run on paper or in software – and this is nothing more than guesswork. Without real benchmarks or hardware, this is nothing more than hot air.

Source. Bolt Graphics

Power consumption: Physically feasible?

A GPU with a performance that puts 1000-watt cards in the shade, but only requires 120W via a single 8-pin PCIe connector? Anyone with a basic knowledge of electrical engineering will wonder what magic is at work here. Even with highly optimized production, such an increase in efficiency would be a technological miracle.

Wait and see

Bolt Graphics has made a bold announcement with Zeus, but whether it is a genuine market innovation or just marketing-speak remains to be seen. Until the company presents a working prototype, enthusiasts should remain skeptical – after all, IT history is full of alleged “revolutions” that never saw the light of day.

Source: bolt.graphics