Talk:Physics processing unit
Does anyone else think this comes off as an advertisment? Someone with more knowledge on the subject should probably provide a counter point...
- I removed the advertisement and cleaned it up a bit (it was a PPU and a CPU in the previous version :P).
Useless Anandtech
Calling the link a closer look takes the expression to new depths. Quotiong:
We really don’t know a great deal about the intimate details of the architecture, but a light weight parallel floating point with lots of communications is a good start. We’ve had several guesses at how the hardware works that have been confirmed wrong. But to paraphrase Edison, eliminating all incorrect paths leads to the goal.
The only thing you get is a cookie storm and tons of advertising. I suggest we drop that link.
- No objections received, link deleted.
What is a PPU really?
What the heck makes a core a "physics processing unit" different from an ordinary SIMD vector unit anyway? Is there some kind of special opcode for "calculate Laplacian" or "solve critically damped spring" or something? Collabi 10:17, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
- I have tried to find out but cannot find details on the internals of the PPU. The advantage PhysX has over the Cell processor, is a SDK ready for use, complete with a tutorial. It is possible a patent search can unearth something more substantial than the glossy whitepapers that are available.
- This article states that Sony made an agreement with Ageia to port its SDK to the Cell processor.
- An SDK I can certainly understand; physics simulation is software, you can provide a middleware package to encapsulate that software for developers. You write an API for a software package that runs on a processor. But I can't imagine what special instruction set a chip might have for physics, other than the usual linear algebra. I can find only three patent applications by AGEIA and they seem to be mostly concerned with their algorithm for solving the Linear Complementarity Problem. The chip itself is only sketchily referred to, and appears to be a vector processor essentially like the Cell: a group of parallel math units each with its own memory island. Collabi 23:22, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Distributed Computing?
How viable would a PPU be for various scientific and mathematical computation performed through distributed computing? Gaming and various 3-D modeling are likely to take only a few hours out of the day, but DC is 24/7 and can use all the speed it can get. Is this something BOINC and BOINC apps can and should support?