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• In order run physics effects on your PC today, you typically have to use the CPU, regardless of the platform you rely on. IBM's Xenon & Broadway, Sony Cell, Intel Core or AMD Phenom - all of these CPUs, however, have not yet shown that they can be capable physics drivers, so, in our opinion, specialized physics accelerators will be the solution for the future. Even at Intel there is Larrabee, which is designed to become an all-purpose accelerator chip that is used for graphics as well as ray-tracing and physics, according to sources close to company. The second part of the equation is the development of next-generation game engines, which are going to drive implementation of real-world physics with next-generation consoles and PCs. Let's look the public statements made in regards to the Nvidia-Ageia deal: Nvidia released a following statement from Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO: "The AGEIA team is world class, and is passionate about the same thing we are - creating the most amazing and captivating game experiences. By combining the teams that created the world's most pervasive GPU and physics engine brands, we can now bring GeForce-accelerated PhysX to hundreds of millions of gamers around the world." Manju Hegde, co-founder and CEO of Ageia, released the following statement: "Nvidia is the perfect fit for us. They have the world's best parallel computing technology and are the thought leaders in GPUs and gaming." True or not, the two statements refer to the present situation. But this deal was all about the future and controlling (or at least balancing) the world of physics computing, which set to march beyond the domain of games. Based on these statements, you might think that all currently-shipped GeForce products support PhysX, while the truth is that PhysX will be implemented in future chips, destined to be shipped in the hundreds of millions. Suddenly there is a pretty good reason for developers and publishers to jump on PhysX immediately. Following the acquisition yesterday, we had the chance to talk to Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games and the brain behind the Unreal engine. Sweeney said that "we've had a great relationship with the Ageia team for years, and bundle their PhysX library with Unreal Engine 3 as its standard physics solution." He added that he was "happy to see Nvidia jump in and throw its massive weight behind physics." Sweeney mentioned that he is planning to use Ageia physics features with "future Unreal Engine 3 games on all platforms." The "all platforms" note is particularly interesting. Hidden away from the eyes of public, engineers are creating next-generation Xbox, next-gen PlayStation and next-gen Wii titles. We managed to find out that all creative spirits of these projects are now hidden in caves, working hard on getting the new silicon for future parts. You can expect that new wave of consoles comes will come to market in the 2010/11 timeframe, even though conservative estimates are talking about 2012 at this point. But, clearly, Nvidia's mention of "hundreds of millions of gamers" was a signal for the IT industry as whole. It will be driven in all major graphics application markets. When it comes to PC itself, Nvidia has several plans, seen in this author's 2nd grade MSPaint skills in the picture above. The future is in physics being rendered on Nvidia's integrated chipsets and graphics cards. The key to this strategy is not to think just about Intel or AMD processors, but a bit wider than that. If we are listening to the "rumors that could be true" department, we should to pay attention to the next-generation Sony console, which may integrate physics capability directly into Nvidia's GPU, which reportedly is not going to be the last-minute patchwork Nvidia had to deliver with the PS3 RSX GPU. What makes this deal a sensible solution is the fact that Ageia has the engineers to take advantage of Nvidia's future hardware. You can bet the farm on the fact that future GPUs will have substantial input from Ageia's staff in terms of effectively channeling: Current GPUs have a deadly flaw in GPGPU terms - there are substantial performance penalties when branching is used. At the other hand, CPU and PPU excel in branching, because there is enough cache to put "what-if" instructions and correctly predict what could happen. Intel knew that and is building Larrabee with massive cache in the middle, while Nehalem, Westmere and Sandy Bridge will continue to increase the overall amount of cache, while re-introducing Hyper-Threading, enabling up to 16 threads on a single socket. It is too early to say what will be the first GPU influenced by Ageia's engineers, but we expect that some influence might already be seen in the high-end graphics chip coming in 2009.

• Fast forward to November of 2007. AMD is in trouble and the natural call for Jen-Hsun Huang surfaced again. Approaching Ruiz and the gang with the attitude "what goes around, comes around" and "I want to buy you now" did not go well, we hear. But business is business and is never personal. There was no reason why the deal would not have gone through. All Nvidia needed was enough money to take the company AND the debt. A repeat of the 3dfx charade is not an option here. However, in order for that to happen, the only way to go was to get support from partners from AMD's eco-system and this is where the trouble apparently started. While Nvidia is achieving record success with sales, it has done so by weakening its partners. From a company that started selling GPUs with memory back in GeForce3 days (and threw Guillemot/Hercules out of the race), Nvidia turned into a company that now sells a complete card, and partners are nothing else but "sticker stampers". This crashed the profits of all the companies involved, and many disappeared. With Nvidia controlling the AIB market for both ATI and Nvidia products, Taiwan would rush into Intel's arms. Memories of what happened with 3dfx when an ex-Siemens CEO took over the company are still livid in the world of graphics card manufacturers. The second unfavorable factor is the debt-to-equity ratio. Nvidia has a lot of money in the bank, currently about $2.4 billion, but to eat up a company like AMD, it would have to cough up somewhere in tune of $10 billion, since AMD is $5.4 billion in debt. But with AMD on-board, any rumors that Nvidia is toast would be eliminated forever. Also, Intel would have to face Nvidia on almost every front of its businesses. Nvidia can easily diversify into a networking company (it bought a 3Com team ages ago, which is the reason for the brilliant "plug'n'play" connectivity in nForce chipsets), into a handheld company (APX 2500 is much more important than you might think at first), desktop platforms (Phenom+nForce+GeForce), mobile platforms (Turion+nForce+GeForce), workstation platforms (Opteron+nForce Pro+Quadro), server platforms (Opteron+nForce Pro+Tesla), HPC platforms (Opteron+nForce Pro+Tesla), etc. And, of course, with the recent purchase of Ageia, nothing would stop the company from implementing PhysX in every pore of its DNA. Sadly, Huang's fault is the fact that he believes in the value of a single company. Just like the company destroyed the 3dfx line-up and did not use the world's second IT brand (Voodoo, just after Pentium) to its full potential, we have no doubt that Nvidia would cannibalize ATI and basically screw up its chipset development, as well as the development of future Radeons. Instead of creating synergy, the company would probably lose valuable time in preparations for the arrival of Nehalem and Sandy Bridge from the CPU side, and Larrabee from the cGPU side.

• TH: Enough with the Inquisition! Let’s look forward. Do you anticipate Stream and GPGPU technology being applied in the consumer space beyond today’s video player/editor/transcoder apps? AMD: Yes, very much so. Applications like physics simulation, AI, and video processing are natural to accelerate using Stream/GPGPU/parallel technologies. The key challenge is to get programmers to start using the hardware and programming languages/APIs that are available to them to properly model the compute problem. OpenCL and DirectX 11 Compute make major advances in how a programmer can harness the processing power of a modern GPU. TH: Some have proposed that the GPU will someday overtake the CPU in prominence, and certainly the GPGPU benefits we’ve witnessed make that seem more plausible. Given the impending arrival of Fusion and the continuing evolution of Stream, what is AMD’s stance on the role of graphics processing and the GPU going forward? AMD: It is simply wrong and, quite frankly, self-serving when companies say that a GPU is the most important processor in the PC. It is equally wrong to say x86 CPUs are the most efficient processors to solve all compute problems. The answer is “it depends.” The workload or compute problem determines what is the best processor to handle that particular workload or compute problem. CPUs are great for linear/out-of-order/unpredictable compute problems while GPUs are great for parallel workloads like video processing, physics simulation, or AI. Trying to modify or adapt a compute problem to suit the hardware that a company happens to sell is not the way forward. It is also easy to forget a third class of processor—fixed function. Fixed function blocks are often overlooked these days because they are no longer in vogue. People mistakenly believe that general purpose devices cure all. Rubbish. Fixed function blocks for things like video decoding or tessellation are not only great from a power perspective but they also scale very well from the top of a product stack to the bottom. Those products that only have general purpose processing will be less power efficient and will not scale better than processors that balance general purpose and fixed function. Finally, fixed function blocks are best for compute problems that are neither efficient for CPUs or GPUs, like the reverse entropy portion of H.264 decode. The best solution is a good balance of x86 CPU, modern GPU, and fixed function. A balanced platform for the average consumer will be the best solution as it will have all the compute elements. AMD’s Fusion products will balance all three processor types. Having a fast CPU or GPU alone won’t cut it today. TH: Given the recent hotfix and Stream update, how would AMD now characterize Stream versus CUDA in terms of quality and performance? AMD: Well, I usually prefer to provide the hardware and software so that you can test and build your own opinion, but objectively I believe that the ATI Stream transcoding framework has leapfrogged CUDA transcoding with this update both on performance and quality. I say “objectively” because it’s first time we have an application (MediaShow Espresso) that enables both technologies and thus direct comparison.