Have you got PhysX

There was a time when we used to play games using the integraed APU(Audio Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) on board. Later on with the advent of games like Quake, Doom, Far Cry and many more it became a acute necessity to have a good sound and graphics card plugged to your machine. Few days back we had never thought of anything new to come in this field. All Asus launched was a dual-core graphics card which itself can be doubled on an SLI bridge; and i felt it is probably end of the road. But a relatively unknown company AGEIA launched a PPU (Physics Processing Unit) chipset. And now I have starded having wild imaginations of the Games that would be harnessing its power. I am sure these imaginations are not limited to me; id, Eidos, Valve will also be having such dreams.

The card named PhysX now competes with the Havok Physics Engine (Max Payne fame), in the market. But Both have very different way of execution; PhysX is a Hardware Physics accelerator whereas Havok is a software based engine. The software needs to be bound by the game developer with the game. Software based engines puts much stress upon the CPU and the GPU to have its work done. However the PPUs can be plugged by the users and they can do their job dedicatedly.

AGEIA has not disclosed much technical details about this processor, as they are the only player in this field right now and are being cautious enough to reveal too much. But the information they gave isn't too less to make you jump. The PhysX hardware includes-

125 Million transistors
130nm manufacturing process
128MB 733MHz Data Rate GDDR3 RAM
128-bit memory bus interface
20 giga-instructions per second
2 Tb/sec internal memory bandwidth
"Dozens" of fully independent cores

ASUS has recently launched a Physics card based on this PhysX chipset. It looks a lot simpler than some of the recent graphics cards though. The other one which has come out with a PhysX is BFG Tech. I still remember the Far Cry 64bit version demo video, which boasted of advanced physics simulation and rendering due to the power of AMD64 architecture. That was really marvelous. And now I really can't wait to see it done by a fully dedicated hardware. Till now 20 games have been announced for PhysX PPU. To name a few-
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends
Unreal Tournament 2007
With future Unreal Engine 3 and Ubisoft games supporting a PPU, AGEIA has has made a good breakthrough.

Here is a screenshot from Ghost Recon rendered with (left) and without (right) PhysX. (source AnandTech)










Consumer acceptance is key to the success of the PPU. Let's just see if the game crazy consumers who are already spending thousands of bucks on GPU will accept a new expence just on the name of more realistic experience.

Cray chooses AMD for its supercomputers

Today I was going through the reader's comments section of a news article and found this post claiming that Intel's supremacy in microprocessor industry is beyond doubt as most premium brand in household computing, Apple has endorsed Intel processors. I just posted a short reply there asking what would he say if he comes to know that the most premium brand in supercomputing industry has endorsed AMD. But posting just a reply didn't seem enough to me and i thought of posting this story here, though its quite old.

According to a press release on Cray's site on Nov 14th '05 AMD and Cray announced that they have reached an agreeemntto exten their ten year long relationship and hence Cray will use Opteron chips to build its microprocessor based supercomputers in future. The two firms will actively collaborate on Cray's mid-2006 proposal for Phase 3 of the federal government's DARPA HPCS (High Productivity Computing Systems) program.

Cray President and CEO Peter Ungaro stated that after very extensive review of marketplace alternatives they have chosen AMD64 platform as the microarchitecture for our next-generation supercomputer products. He also said "In the near-term, the AMD Opteron processor roadmap provides our customers a smooth upgrade path to multi-core systems. Through 2010, AMD's multi-core processor roadmap and HyperTransport(TM) technology capabilities stand out for their ability to help meet our aggressive performance goals. Our success working with AMD in developing the Cray XT3(TM) and the Cray XD1(TM) systems gives us great confidence that AMD is the right partner to help Cray advance the boundaries of high performance computing."

Currently two of the Cray supercomps run on Opterons, Cray XT3 and Cray XD1; while the Cray X1E is based on Cray custom-built vector processors.

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Counting the foolish efforts

AMD has recently setup ticker display billboards in Times Square in New York City and along Route 101 in California's Silicon Valley. According to Brent Kerby, AMD's product marketing manager for Opteron, the display shows a theoretical electric bill representing the worldwide cost incurred by companies running servers with Intel's Xeon chips instead of AMD's Opteron chips. Currently the amount exceeds $1 billion, aggregating $24 roughly per second.

The locations that AMD has chosen to display the tickers are very strategic. One billboard is situated in Times Square only blocks away from the debt clock that inspired it. The other is along U.S. Highway 101, in a spot where it is sure to be seen by Silicon Valley executives on their daily commute.

According to Nathan Brookwood, head of market research outfit Insight64, in Saratoga, California AMD has the advantage over Intel on power consumption, at least for now. Over the last two years AMD processors have been using a lot less power than Intel's.

AMD has started playing the same game excelling in which Intel has managed to keep majority consumers away from AMD processors which undoubtebly outperform their counterparts. But AMD has still got to learn a lot more about marketing. In the words of Jim McGregor, analyst with InStat/MDR "If AMD can learn one thing from Intel, it's about how best to use its resources toward effective marketing. AMD may have learned to be a technology leader, but it hasn't learned how to be a market leader. There's a big difference."

Dance of Dell

The World Congess on Information Technology (WCIT) concluded on the 5th of May inTexas. Nothing very new happened there. But the news that caused ripples was Dell joining the Green Grid. Though Dell is not a technology company (all it does it assembling PCs that aren't even best in the world) and what steps it takes haven't ever bothered me.

Though Dell was not alone to join the nexus, APC and VMware also joined the Green Grid along witgh Dell. Since few years Dell has seen its server market slump against the energy efficient and faster Opteron powered servers sold by Sun, HP, IBM and many more. Knowing the fact that enterprise customers do full study before deciding on what product to buy, and hence calculate the profitabilities like no other home user does; Dell can't cater them just anything that sells by its name.

The Green Grid comprises of companies like AMD, IBM, HP, Rackable Systems and Egenera; and I don't find Dell standing anywhere near them if technological abilities are considered. The main purpose of forming this group was to do research and development to increase computing power by reducing the energy consumptions of processors in future. I wonder how could dell help in doing that.

Dell's move only shows the level of distrust that even the staunch supporters of Intel have in it. Afterall How many of the Intel's claims have come true so far. HP has already paid much price for having blind faith on Intel regarding the Itanium. Dells message is clear, we sell intel products only because it sells ( it's the product of general masses) but it hasn't got a future for sure.