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The Physics Chip

Very high geekdom... Due to the development of advanced gaming software with incredibly high graphics demands, video card makers have moved a lot of image processing from the host computer and onto dedicated computers on their video card products. This allows for greater efficiency for the host computer and some incredible graphics for the gamer (and photographer, CAD user, or for anyone who keeps multiple windows open on their desktop) (I do all three -- thanks gamers!) Some people have gone as far to tap the resources of these cards for specialized Scientific Computing as the GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are very oriented to scalar and vector three-dimensional rendering. Well, it seems that video card manufacturer NVidia is developing a special "Physics Chip" designed to process Newtonian mechanics found in the physics of realistic games and to assist the video cards as well as being targeted towards scientific computational needs. From The Register Hardware:

Asus exposes Nvidia physics card product
Nvidia is developing a standalone games physics processing card, motherboard maker Asus has let slip. Announcing a new mobo equipped with three PCI Express x16 slots, the Taiwanese firm said the third connector was specifically for "Nvidia's upcoming Physics card".

The revelation comes days after it emerged ATI will be likewise pitching its graphics chip technology as a co-processor for compute-intensive scientific and engineering applications, not just games physics.

Both Nvidia and ATI have been eyeing the opportunities physics processing offers to help them sell more graphics cards for some time. This year, both firms have allied themselves with Havok, the games middleware company that's developed a games physics API that can accelerate physical effects calculations on the GPU.

GPUs aren't far front the point where they'll be able to deliver fully photorealistic imagery at high resolutions and high framerates. As such they're going to need new markets for their parallel processing technology. Scientific and financial modelling calculations are obvious markets to aim for, alongside game physics.

Very cool -- prices should come down fairly quickly and this will be a boon to small engineering companies. There is a field called Computational Fluid Dynamics that is very processor intensive and this is a CPU that would greatly improve the speed of processing. Startup Chipmaker Ageia just started selling their PhysX chip Once again -- thanks gamers!!! Posted by DaveH at September 23, 2006 8:21 PM