Back when Cell was first announced I was talking to a friend and asked how long it would take for someone to take Cell's SPE array, stick it on a PCIe card, and sell it as a physics processor...well given AGEIA's PR wave, the answer is not long apparently. While AGEIA's PhysX has no architectural relationship to IBM/Sony/Tosh's Cell processor, the fundamental design philosophy is quite similar.
Our own Derek Wilson just published his thoughts on AGEIA's PPU, which succinctly explains the need and the fulfillment of that need by AGEIA's new processor. Although I'm not sure a separate card is the best way of incorporating this type of a unit in a modern day gaming box, it definitely won't be in x86 CPUs for a while if Intel's roadmap presented at IDF is to be adhered to. Intel won't be shipping specialized cores in multi-core IA microprocessors for at least another 5+ years, giving companies like AGEIA ample time to step in and gain control of the market (as well as help it evolve).
I can't help but think that the two current giants of consumer level parallel processing, ATI and NVIDIA, won't sit by idle while the physics revolution takes place...
Our own Derek Wilson just published his thoughts on AGEIA's PPU, which succinctly explains the need and the fulfillment of that need by AGEIA's new processor. Although I'm not sure a separate card is the best way of incorporating this type of a unit in a modern day gaming box, it definitely won't be in x86 CPUs for a while if Intel's roadmap presented at IDF is to be adhered to. Intel won't be shipping specialized cores in multi-core IA microprocessors for at least another 5+ years, giving companies like AGEIA ample time to step in and gain control of the market (as well as help it evolve).
I can't help but think that the two current giants of consumer level parallel processing, ATI and NVIDIA, won't sit by idle while the physics revolution takes place...
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Pete - Friday, March 11, 2005 - link
It seems clear that this would be best integrated into graphics cards. We do not have the spare slots for such specific processors.Regarding sound integration, I think the ship has sailed on that, this will move forward on the MB chipset.
Since this is very gaming specific I don't see it as viable on the MB and considering the cost of a high end GPU the fit is really excellent there.
Ecmaster76 - Friday, March 11, 2005 - link
Perhaps one of those PPU could be fitted with a hypertransport interface and placed on a 940 pin package. They already have a DDR interface built in. So, with a bios tweak(assuming its possible), you could just drop it in as a coprocessor for Opteron workstations.