AGEIA PhysX

The first processor to be advertised as a PPU was called the PhysX chip, introduced by a fabless semiconductor company called AGEIA. Games wishing to take advantage of the PhysX PPU must use AGEIA's PhysX SDK, (formerly known as the NovodeX SDK).

It consists of a general purpose RISC core controlling an array of custom SIMD floating point VLIW processors working in local banked memories, with a switch-fabric to manage transfers between them. There is no cache-hierarchy as in a CPU or GPU.

The PhysX was available from three companies akin to the way video cards are manufactured. ASUS, BFG Technologies, and ELSA Technologies were the primary manufacturers. PCs with the cards already installed were available from system builders such as Alienware, Dell, and Falcon Northwest.

In February 2008 after Nvidia bought Ageia Technologies and eventually cut off the ability to process PhysX on the AGEIA PPU and NVIDIA GPUs in systems with active ATi/AMD GPUs, it seemed that PhysX went 100% to Nvidia. But in March 2008, Nvidia announced that it will make PhysX an open standard for everyone, so the main graphic-processor manufacturers will have PhysX support in the next generation graphics cards. Nvidia announced that PhysX will also be available for some of their released graphics cards just by downloading some new drivers.

See physics engine for a discussion of academic research PPU projects.

PhysX P1 (PPU) hardware specifications

ASUS and BFG Technologies bought licenses to manufacture alternate versions of AGEIA's PPU, the PhysX P1 with 128MB GDDR3.

Multi-core MIPS architecture-based device with integrated physics acceleration hardware and memory subsystem with "tons of cores" 125 million transistors 182 mm2 die size Memory: 128 MB GDDR3 RAM on 128-bit interface Interface: 32-bit PCI 3.0 (ASUS also made a PCI-Express 1x version card) Sphere collision tests: 530 million per second (maximum capability) Convex collision tests: 530,000 per second (maximum capability) Peak Instruction Bandwidth: 20 billion per second Peak Power Consumption: 30 W Fabrication Process: 130 nm