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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.

• At the end of the day, the Ageia acquisition could be another lucrative acquisition for Nvidia that can be traced down to Jen-Hsun Huang, known to industry insiders as an extremely dedicated individual who is lucky enough to have the whole company behind him. The reason for this almost fanatical fellowship at Nvidia lies within some publicized events in Nvidia's past. For instance, when Nvidia has hit with the trouble surrounding the GeForce FX, Jen-Hsun Huang and the executive decided not to fire anyone. Cost-cutting was mainly done on the executive level, but unlike Apple's $1 salary, this move was not advertised at all. All of the executives did not took any bonuses and invested heavily in the company, also reducing their salary to the legal minimum (read: Steve Jobs salary minus the stock options), just to get through rough weather. The storm did not last for long, but the executive team got a massive payoff: The whole company is now said to stands by its leadership and the constant expansion only speaks of the power the company now has. When AMD acquired ATI, several industry insiders and analysts were quick to say that Nvidia's days are over. With Intel Larrabee on one side and AMD Fusion on another, wiping out Nvidia was expected to be a walk in the park. However, today Nvidia is a billion dollar per quarter company. We have often said that we expect GPGPUs the next big thing and Nvidia's CUDA is in place to take advantage of this trend. Nvidia's current market cap is $14.46 billion, while AMD is at $4.59 billion. Sadly for Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia could not took over AMD, since he reportedly was unable to generate support for the move - despite he publicly always said that he isn't interested in CPUs, but wanted to focus on graphics instead. We heard that the debt-to-equity ratio was too big for the current size of the company. It will be interesting to see what will happen when Fusion and Nehalem arrive on desktop and mobile platforms. There have been talks that AMD could become an interesting acquisition target once cost is under control and there is more visibility how effective its roadmap will be. There may be another chance for Huang. With integration of PhysX into its products, Nvidia is providing a clear signal that the nForce chipset is not going anywhere and that the company will continue to squeeze the CPU to the point where the CPU is just another component of a computer, regardless of Intel's plans to integrate everything into Nehalem/QuickPath interface (formerly known as CSI: Santa Clara or Nehalem's direct interconnect like Hypertransport). The only thing that Nvidia will have to be careful about are FSB licenses. If that is the case, the company will continue to be a formidable rival.

• It’s very tempting to compare Larrabee and Cell. Both use a multitude of single cores (in-order), putting the accent on vector calculation, 256 KB of dedicated memory per core, a ring bus to connect it all, etc. The similarities are numerous at first glance. Yet, the differences are also substantial: The Cell is first and foremost a CPU. Although it’s oriented toward streaming-type applications, it is not intended for rendering calculation, and consequently, there are no texture units. Another major difference is in the way memory is managed. On the Cell, except for the PPE, which is the only part of the processor that has a global vision of the memory space, all the SPU's memory accesses are limited to 256 KB of local store memory. So, access to main memory must be done explicitly via direct memory access (DMA) operations. Conversely, as we saw earlier, all of Larrabee’s cores have access to the entire memory space, via a cache memory whose management is transparent to the programmer, even if the programmer does have a certain form of control. Intel’s choice greatly simplifies programming and avoids having to include a more generalist core like the PPE. This heterogeneous system is one of the Cell’s handicaps, since it complicates things for the programmer. In addition to explicit management of memory, he or she must also build two executables using two different sets of instructions, which means using two different compilers. So Larrabee’s cores are much more complete than the Cell’s SPUs, since they support all the x86 instructions. However, their performance is also better in terms vector calculation. That’s because they operate on 512-bit vectors instead of the SPUs’ 128 bits, and while the Cell should have the advantage in clock frequency (Larrabee is expected to clock at 2 to 2.5 GHz, but that’s still very hypothetical), that doesn’t compensate for such a big disadvantage. So does that mean the Cell has nothing going for it? Not really. The Cell, with 234 million transistors (a number that was impressive three years ago but is far from earth shattering today) will be significantly less costly to manufacture than the Larrabee, which will be much larger and very expensive to produce. Finally, although it hasn’t met with the success some were expecting, the Cell is still built into more than 20 million PlayStation 3s, and lot of programmers who have been working very hard at developing applications for this platform for three years now have undeniable expertise in how to get the most out of it. For the time being, Larrabee only exists on paper, and even once it becomes available, few programmers are likely to have the courage to “write to the metal.” Most will simply use the APIs (OpenGL/Direct3D for 3D and OpenCL/Compute Shader for GPGPU). However, from a hardware point of view, it’s undeniable that Larrabee is much more interesting. The Cell prefigured several important concepts that are now showing up in Larrabee. But with hindsight, it may have been too ambitious for its time, and IBM had to make serious compromises to make its vision compatible with the technology available then.