NVIDIA To Buy AGEIA

The two companies announced today that NVIDIA will acquire PhysX maker AGEIA; terms were not disclosed. The Daily Tech is one of the few covering the news to go much beyond the press release, mentioning that AMD considered buying AGEIA last November but passed, and that the combination positions NVIDIA to compete with Intel on a second front, beyond the GPU — as Intel purchased AGEIA competitor Havok last September. While NVIDIA talked about supporting the PhysX engine on their GPUs, it's not clear whether AGEIA's hardware-based physics accelerator will play any part in that. AMD declared GPU physics dead last year, but NVIDIA at least presumably begs to differ. The coverage over at PC Perspectives goes into more depth on what the acquisition portends for the future of physics, on the GPU or elsewhere.

Comments

More Fuel For The Nvidia CPU Fire.

[milsoRgen]

It's long been speculated that nVidia has been developing an x86 processor. I think they great work they did on the 8xxx series cards and the fantastic chipsets they have produced really lend credence to this theory. They could make a very strong processor, especially as it appears we're heading to CPU's with heavy GPU integration. AMD Fusion... It's not so much to put a graphics card in a chip. It's to make a CPU do what GPU's excel at. Very exciting times for hardware enthusiasts indeed!