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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.
I always thought that GPU + physics engine would be a perfect combination. Ultimately, the AGEIA card is just a DSP + software driver for calculating physics. A GPU is... also a DSP + software driver for calculating graphics. It wouldn't be too hard to write a driver that does both: some of the pipelines could be allocated to graphics, and some to physics. Might even make a software-configurable to dedicate more/less units to physics.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_processing_unit#Cell_Processor_vs_PPUs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_processing_unit#GPUs_vs_PPUs
There are differences. Otherwise Sony wouldn't have wet themselves when they announced Cell technology in the PS3 or Microsoft could of countered their ATI GPU was pretty much the same thing or more powerful or however the market types would of spun it if that was the case
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
except Intel doesn't think they need Nvidia... that's why they've got nearly all the notebook vendors pumping out crappy built-in graphics that just barely run Windows Vista. ATI saw the writing on the wall and got themselves bought by AMD. Now AMD battles on CPUs, integrated graphics, and high end graphics... Intel can never buy Nvidia because they'd be instantly sued. Nvidia overpriced themselves, even with all the work they did for AMD, and the matching logos... stock holders were just too rich for AMD.
This makes Nvidia the "odd man out" because they don't make processors. Both Intel and AMD have integrated solutions and obviously want physics processing on the CPU so that they can sell 7 core 3.21GHz processors. NVidia has to break the mold if they want sales... they got shunned the last round of consoles for IBM and ATI, and Microsoft pretty much let ATI write the book for DX10 this round. NVidia + Ageia only makes sense if they'll make an open source console that runs either AMD or Intel CPUs. Games would need to run flawlessly, without "installing" just like a console. There's a hole for PC gaming right now... Apple's not filling it (they think it's stupid) Wintel is not helping (Microsoft only wants Vista gaming, and Intel wants to sell integrated graphics) so a well done Linux console could help... but there's too much IP in the way to make it happen.