Physics acceleration has yet to capture the attention of game developers and the public at large, but with Nvidia and Intel taking over physics specialists Ageia and Havok respectively, AMD had to find an answer to stay competitive in the long term. Now, in a bit of an unusual cooperation, AMD has partnered with Intel-owned Havok to improve the way its graphics chips can handle physics and other scientific calculations.
The partnership will ensure that Havok physics can take full advantage of AMD's Radeon GPU architecture, though the main focus at the moment appears to be the company's CPUs. According to Havok's managing director, David O'Meara, the feedback that they consistently receive from leading game developers is that core game play simulation should be performed on CPU cores, and thus performance and scalability of the CPU is the clear priority.
Hopefully it won't be too long before we start seeing the results of these partnerships in a forthcoming generation of Radeon GPUs or gamer-oriented AMD CPUs.