Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3160

Time for a PPU?

by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 11, 2005 12:59 PM EST


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...

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