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Hardware accelerator for physics calulations

A San Jose startup is building a “physics accelerator” for PCs that will contain hardware optimized for calculating realistic simulations of real-world physics — they hope that this will bridge the gap between general-purpose PCs and the specialized game-graphics cards in consoles.

Dubbed PhysX, the chip will enable things like gelatinous creatures whose bodies shift shape like a liquid, crumpling fenders in car crashes, massive explosions with 10,000 pieces of debris, clothing that hangs realistically, and lava or blood that flows like the real thing.

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(via Pseudorandom)


Update: Thomas sez,

This card could lead into an interesting political conflict.

A huge amount of fast and accurate physics calculations is needed not only
for games, but also for development of modern weapons – calculations of
laminar and turbulent flow are important for everything from an implosion
of a nuclear payload to an aerodynamic behavior of its hypersonic carrier,
to design of fuel-air explosives. (Which, actually, is easier than games,
as you can go out for lunch while you run your calculations – something
unthinkable in the real-time world of computer games.)

In the civilian world, the universities will be extremely happy for this
card. A device geared for normal consumer market, for normal consumer
price, will make a substantial number of cash-strapped theoretical
physicists happy as clams.

Also, projects like the Protein Folding, are prime candidates for
harnessing the power of this kind of an accelerator.

Not even mentioning bruteforcing of passwords, a task well-known for its
parallelism-friendliness.

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