A source from NVIDIA confirms the acquisition of AGEIA. In other news, Kyle Bennett is wrong.
NVIDIA adheres to the old adage that if you can’t beat’em, join’em. After spending some serious cash and effort attempting to combine the PPU functionality into their GPUs, NVIDIA decides to shell out the dough and buy the experts. According to our source at NVIDIA, this purchase has been confirmed and is the very same purchase we had suspected, alongside Fudzilla, a week ago.
The fact of the matter is that in April of last year ATI and NVIDIA were neck deep in the race for multipurpose GPUs and while both had great plans, ultimately the available product was not there to compete with AGEIA’s technology. With Intel’s purchase of Havok, that meant that either the AMD/ATI group or NVIDIA would have to start to compete in the physics market. With AMD/ATI’s downward slope during the last year, they were in no place to be purchasing. NVIDIA however has been enjoying continued success and is more than happy to welcome Ageia to their technology fold.
Kyle Bennett, Editor in Chief and Founder of HardOCP, should be enjoying a nice big helping of his own words. After initial reports came in last week that AGEIA was to be acquired by an unknown bidder, Kyle Bennett promptly and brazenly refuted these claims, as if he were somehow affiliated with one of the companies involved and knew what he was talking about. This ruffled quite a few feathers amongst editors of the sites that posted the news. Well, now it would appear that he was completely and utterly wrong.
It will be interesting to see how this acquisition plays out in several ways, not the least of which is the effect on game developer Valve Software. In a highly quoted news story on the renown tech industry blog Next Generation, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell publically denounced AGEIA’s PhysX technology, stating that,
“I think [the physics processing unit] is a horrible idea. At the same time that the distinction between the GPU and CPU is going away, the PPU guys want to come in and define a new set of abstractions, where we have memory and data that’s really far away from the CPU and CPU… How do I tell when something breaks, or gets pushed by a monster? All these decisions I have on my CPU have to sit around until they are resolved on the PPU and GPU, and you end up with a physics decelerator. This is the reason you want a homogenous architecture,”
Considering Valve’s new relationship with NVIDIA, it is reasonable to believe Kyle Bennett won’t be the only one eating his words when this acquisition is formally announced.
UPDATE: NVIDIA has posted the official press release on their site. There is not too much information given here, but it is said that additional details will be discussed in the quarterly conference call to take place on the 13th of this month.
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