PPU what does this mean to simulation?

[keltuzar]

Check this really interesting product from AGEIA; it is supposedly the first Physical Processing unit.

http://www.ageia.com/

[malexander]

It means you have to buy yet another PCI-E card to run a bunch of future programs

At 130 million transistors, able to handle 30000 RBD objects and deal with collision detection in hardware, it sounds as or more complex than a graphics card GPU. But just how it fits into a system has me a little baffled; because it has its own API (like OpenGL for physics), this means that a software package (like, say, Houdini) would need to support that API *and* have its own physics API, for those users that don't have the card or chip in their system. As a developer, doing twice the work isn't very desirable. And hardware APIs have this way of being limited by the hardware specs, somewhat limiting their usefulness (as an example, the latest OpenGL drivers *still* don't support non-power of 2 textures, making image processing via the GPU a pain).

That being said, handling 30000 RBD objects is great, but how complex can each object be? Do they have to be made up of tris? Quads? Or is a tri an object? What simulation parameters can you adjust (bounciness, gravity, etc). Does it support deforming RBD geo? How finely can it sub-sample? It sounds great on paper, but the details are so scant that it's really hard to tell how powerful the unit actually is. It sounds like it's targeted towards games (or marketing departments), so I'd be surprised if it could do RBD like most of us would expect.

"Whitepapers" like this always make me a little nervous. Lots of hype, no specs... suddenly people seem to expect that your app should run 100's of times faster. Many poeple don't understand the hardware's limitations (because the press releases rarely mention them) and come to blame your app instead. I'll be curious to see how long the "PPU" lasts, or to at least see a decent spec sheet

Personally, I'd rather have dozens more SSE registers, better SSE vector/matrix math support and better SSE compiler support - sort of like what Motorola has done with Altivec - rather than yet another hardware processor & API.

[Jason]

Those are good points, Mark.

If these become a standard or the hardware guys provide software simuilation to their API if the hardware is missing, perhaps this could be most useful for games and such instead?