News AMD has considered buying Ageia

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/11/22/amd_has_considered_buying_ageia/1

Physics has been one of those industry buzzwords for a while now, and it looks like the company that raised the awareness could well be on the road to acquisition.

 

Is AMD trying to go bankrupt?

 

i just hope nvidia buys them out and kills them, it hasn't been a success, it needs integration with those GPUs and an install base that size to take off

I would rather a GPU based Havok solution, from what ive seen of ageia physics they are very buggy (ut3 stretching limbs etc), havok isn't great either, nothing i've seen has touched the Karma physics in UT2004, but best of a bad bunch i guess.

 

Not really.

They( Intel, amd, nvidia...) have already found out that the physics effect is doing a increasingly significant job in gaming, and such importance would inrease faster in furture together with the increasingly powerful hardwares.
AMD would never want to lose a a big tech advantage, especially about gaming currently.

 

I jokingly said to a friend that AMD would do that and intergrate it into the fusion project.
I didn't think I was that close to the truth.

I think AMD may try to do this as it would be helpful in the long term and may leave Nvidia out in the cold (AMD and intel will be able to do CPU+GPU+PPU+Chipset, and Nvidia can only do GPU+Chipset)

Short team though is the bigger problem as I think it would be hard for them to go into bigger debt at the moment.

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

Nothing another cpu core cant be doing (ala source engine)

 

oh come on. buying ATI was very risky and i can see why they did it. buying Ageia? that's just dumb.

 

buying ageia is dumb if you are in a tight squeeze..... now if only they could pull their collective heads out of their collective asses then they could have a chance.....

 

If AMD could integrate these functions into the CPU as extentions (like MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, ...) they might stand a chance of making a go of this.

However, the last time they tried that (3DNow!) the uptake was less than spectacular.

Personally I think it's not a good move for them at the moment and thus unlikely.

 

I've always said that the physics chips will never catch on until they get integrated into a cpu or gpu. So it's a good idea for them to buy the technology, but it's a really stupid idea at that price. Especially considering that I don't see Ageia surviving another 1-2 years on their own.

 

wouldn't game developer's have to pay to use the software physics engine

 

What bothers me is the potential for one company or another (either one) buying the technology, then locking everyone else (and half of the consumer market) out. Much like the current split over SSE4a vs. SSE4.1, I fear market fragmentation.