COMPUTER & ELECTRONIC news

In these days we have had the opportunity to speak on two occasions for the management of physical education in the games, with particular reference to different hardware solutions for the past 18 months have been on the market. ATI and NVIDIA have shown their implementations with the center using a GPU to perform calculations related to physics, while Ageia has presented its own PPU (Physics Processing Unit) specifically earmarked for physical processing.

Faced with numerous ads since the second half of 2006 onwards, the management of physics in games than through the CPU did not lead to the release of a market solution for the ATI approach than for what NVIDIA, while Ageia began marketing its solutions with a timid success of the market, primarily the result of reduced number of games can benefit from the presence of this video architecture.

The future of Ageia, now that Intel has completed the acquisition of Havok, seems anything but rosy, and for this reason there are some rumors about a possible acquisition of Ageia by AMD, as shown in this article.

The reasons for AMD's acquisition of Ageia are linked not so much to chip PhysX, mounted on the cards Ageia on the market, as the software component: As developed by Ageia, in fact, is completely free and intellectual property of this type could represent for AMD a direct response to Intel, which has acquired the software for the management of physical svilupapti by Havok.

At present the main obstacle to the completion of a transaction of this type appear to be linked to the cost of purchase. The value of Ageia, in terms of volume market is well under 100 million dollars, which are designated as a reference price, on the other hand, the intellectual property of Ageia are unique niche in the market related to the management of physical, and other companies besides AMD may be interested in acquiring this company.