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Intel Purchases Havok
Dr. Eggman writes "Gamasutra has the recent announcement; Intel has purchased Havok. 'As the firm noted, Havok 5 features enhancements to its core products, Havok Physics and Havok Animation, and introduces new features for Havok Behavior, a system for developing event-driven character behaviors in a game. Some of the games using Havok technology, particularly its Havok Physics solution, include BioShock, Stranglehold, Halo 2, Half Life 2, Oblivion, Crackdown, and MotorStorm - the company is also rapidly developing and marketing further tool products.' No word on what (if anything) Intel plans to do with its new acquisition."
Intel's gonna do what Intel always does - they're gonna turn that stuff into silicon. Expect a physics engine chip from Intel.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
the pins on the back of the CPUs will react correctly with physics?
My boys will give you the best kind of start, 1400 megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now.
Best way to get ahead in reviews? Optimize a common CPU-intensive component for your products. So long as they provide a generic implementation compatible with competitors' products, game developers will stay happy. But they'll still get that extra FPS lead that ensures benchmark scores over AMD, and a few FPS is all it takes.
Physics acceleration on-die, here we come! Perhaps 'AI' acceleration as well?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Now, when I shoot my Intel chip with a rocket launcher or maybe ride it off a cliff and fall off, it'll look much more realistic. Lets see AMD do that.
What Intel always does is this:
1) throw gobs of money at someone who makes people want to buy better CPUs.
2a) ignore them. ignore that the people who mattered cashed in an left.
or
2b) meddle needlessly
3) continue to make money on CPUs while having no reason to believe the step 1 produced results.
4) realize that your investment in step 1 is now worthless (due to 2a or 2b)
5) sell off investment for a spectacular loss.
When I worked at GE some 15 years ago GE Capital was this highest profit center in the company. They printed money. Credit cards, stocks, equipment rental. They took GE's excess cash and financed the Hell out of anything, and many mo' money.
Compare this to Intel Capital (where I have been for the last 10 years). They are the biggest financial loser in the whole company. They take Intel's excess cash flush it down the toilet. It is viewed as a marketing function not a revenue source.
The #1 aim of Intel is to sell more CPUs. Not motherboards. Not chipsets. Not communication chips. CPUs and only CPUs. Make the middle-finger. That is Intel's revenue bar graph by part and the middle finger is the CPUs. Everything at Intel ultimately serves (or more accurately claims to serve) selling more CPUs.
If someone at Intel wised up (and they won't) they could turn Intel Capital in to another GE Capital. Then they would have two massive revenue streams.
Now since I am revealing Intel secrets. Intel is NOT an engineering company. I repeat NOT an engineering company. They are a manufacturing company.
They're doing something along those lines with the GPU space. Technically, a GPU is little more than a stream processor. Something
you can do 3D graphics with, or DSP, or Physics, etc. I still have to wonder what they were thinking when they snapped up Havok.
They are in the Silicon business predominately- doing some specialized libraries that help highlight their chips that occasionally
get used, mostly because while it makes Intel's chips look good, they don't do as hot on all things with AMD CPUs. So, typically,
people avoid their libs for anything production like a game.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It didn't work out and they had to destroy their secret lab before it got further out of control.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This will no doubt be used by Intel to tout future multi-core CPU releases. As it now has the ability(by force if necessary) to make the havoc engine run even better on their chips. One could dream up many long term ramifications of this.
- Partner with MS to integrate havoc engine into future DirectX releases.
- Realistic chance of Physics on GPU standard (AMD/nVIDIA purchase licensing)
- Potentially hurt 3rd parties that use the engine on other chips. (Cell/PhysX)
- Spur next generation of physics engine that isn't owned by Intel.
Of course Intel could just leave them the hell alone and profit(?). Then again where would the fun in that be.
All game consoles of the current generation use non-Intel chips. Amongst games devs, Havok are reowned for their quality technical support, and the work they put into tweaking their physics engine for all the platforms, Intel PCs, AMD, and PPC consoles.
What's to say Havok won't "focus" their optimization efforts in the future on Intel exclusively?
This is sort of like what Sony did with SN systems (a very good maker of third-party dev tools for consoles) and then dropping all support for non-Sony platforms.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
And look forward to Intel reaffirming their monopolistic status.
Both ATI and Nvidia's GPU based physics acceleration were being made to work with Havok. ATI was working on a 3 card Crossfire rig, 2 for graphics, 1 for physics. I wonder what this will mean for future developments. http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/physics/index.html
PPUs are a dead end thing and Intel is quite aware of that. They aren't a big enough improvement over what a good multi-core processor can do. They also suffer from the "chicken and egg" support problem. Even if the PPU was way above what a processor can do, does a game bother? The problem is that you can't very well go and use the PPU for physics that affect the gameplay. That would mean you'd have to restrict the game to only PPU owners, who are too small a number to make that economical. So that means you have to restrict it to showy physics, things like more fragments in explosions and such. Fair enough, but most people won't buy a card for that. I mean if you've got $300 to blow what makes for better eye candy: A PPU that makes some physics related things look at little better or a high end GPU that makes EVERYTHING look better?
As such it is extremely hard to get it to go past the critical mass where enough people have them that you can start requiring them in games for core gameplay. Thus it makes sense to just start taking advantage of the increasing power in CPUs and use that instead.
I'm amazed how rarely it gets mentioned, but you know, there is an open competitor, sort of. I say "sort of" because I've never actually written a game that needed physics, so I don't know whether ODE is to Havok as OpenGL/SDL is to DirectX/D3D.
Also raises the question: Will Intel force everyone to use Havok to take advantage of any physics-related silicon they develop? Or will they be friendlier to ODE? Or will they not create any physics-specific silicon, and make this whole discussion moot?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Wrong Half Life 2 and its other games based on its engine (CS:S, DOD:S) is not the havok engine
It would be nice if Intel nudged them into supporting other OS's than just MS-Windows. Intel does seem to be multiplatform friendly in other realms. With AMD responding to Intel by opening up ATI, it is a good trend.
the irish times is reporting...
"Intel agreed to buy 100 per cent of the animation software company Havok,
the name that Telekinesys trades under, for about 79.2 million (euro) cash in a deal expected to close within five days."
AFAIK
havok is an irish company spun out of Trinity Collage Dublin. www.tcd.ie
Hopefully we don't see intentionally crippled performance on non-Intel CPUs!
According to reports Intel will buy 100 per cent of Havok, a.k.a. Telekinesys, for about 79.2 million cash in a deal expected to close within five days. That's a good price for a company that produces the best Physics and Animation Simulation technology on the market. The big win for Intel is the staff at Havok, they are some of the best engineers in the business, that is a great addition to Intel and I'm sure it makes for exciting times ahead for Intel's 'Gaming' plans. This is a great purchase for Intel as they will be able to harness the power of Havok's Hydracore technology on their Dual and Quad core chips plus any new cores with CPU and GPU technology built in. I hope this won't mean Havok technology losing it's cross platform flexibility as that is one of the key strengths. Not sure what this means for Ageia but to be honest they are not in the same league as Havok and technically Havok's PhysX is a Intel's cores!!! :-) I wonder what it will mean for HavokFX, that is the physics API that runs off the ATI and nVidia GPUs?
Will be interesting what happens over the next 12-24 months.
Easy, they will make more works of software that use those engines, and will boost those engines so they continually require the most cutting edge cpus.
Intel invests in companies that develop products which make people want to buy higher end chips, for example physics-based acoustic instrument simulation like one company I know.
Just an idea.
This was used to make some of the very best games ever made on multiple platforms. I'm sorry to see it get snapped up by the Borg of silicon. Although I'm probably not nearly as sorry as the companies who currently have games in production using Havok. Games that used Havok http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_using_physics_engines#Games_using_Havok
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
This is about Havok's investors finding an exit strategy, I expect. Havok isn't very profitable, and they had to shrink the company considerably a few years back. Game middleware just isn't that profitable a business. Havok found new investors and hung on, replacing their top management, but the new investors need to cash out at some point. This is it.
The other major player in this space was Mathengine, which was a dot-com of sorts - too much initial investment and too little revenue. EA acquired them a few years ago. I've had EA guys tell me they prefer Havok's physics engine, even though EA owns the Mathengine one.
Ageia's innovation was not their hardware, but their business model. Havok and Mathengine sold to game developers, getting a modest fixed fee for each title, plus some consulting and customization work. That just isn't a big revenue stream. Ageia has an end user product, which has more revenue potential.
1) The game played the same in software and hardware, it just looked better with hardware. Graphics can be scaled up and down a large amount without affecting gameplay. That's not true of physics as much. There are things that you can turn on and off, but a good deal of it affects gameplay and thus can't be optional. You can't very well have a racing sim that cars handle on way for people with physics cards and another way for people without.
2) Graphics accelerators made a MASSIVE noticeable improvement on any setup. It is a night and day kind of thing, not incremental. Physics chips it's more "Ok look you see that? See that thing there? That was made better with the chip." With graphics accelerators it was the difference between playing Quake in 640x480 with a slightly jerky frame rate, and sparkly pixelated textures and playing it dead smooth at 800x600 with nice, filtered textures and alpha blended lights. The improvement is massive and very apparent.
Bye forever!
Also check this out:
http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1421.htm
Intel's "TeraScale" projects include a working prototype of a 80-core chip. Sure those are fairly simple cores, but they are packing decent FP oomph, and they have good branch handling and low latencies for data juggling (unlike DSPs and GPUs) -- quite the dream chip for implementing a physics engine?
They might eventually have in mind something similar to AMD's "special chips for CPU soccets" idea... Going multi-core with x86 while also shooting for more sockets on the mobo for special purposes (such as just running Havok).
Speaking as a professional communication nazi, I have to say that it's our desire for precise communication that prevents us from ruling the world. First of all, being a power-mad fascist dictator requires you to be really good at ambiguity, so that everybody thinks you're on their side, and so that you don't have to take the blame for your own mistakes.
Besides, people find all those corrections to be really obnoxious. That's why we can never raise the army of rabid followers you really need for world domination.
Well, time to burn off some karma: I actually don't have a problem with this. Why should Intel support AMD?
Intel bore the costs of the x86 R&D, and the costs of marketing the platform, AND the costs of writing an extremely good C compiler. When AMD makes a copycat chip, it's no surprise that they can undercut Intel because they don't have any of those overhead costs. I don't have a problem with AMD legally reverse-engineering the x86, but they have no right to claim foul because they were too cheap to write their own compiler.