PPU - “physics processing unit”

Looks like the gaming market continues to help the engineering markets with stuff like this..

Ageia Technologies PhysX processor ? a dedicated ?physics processing unit? (PPU)

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Maybe we'll see PPU chip support for engineering tools soon?

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Reply to
Paul Salvador
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In a story at

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there was a mention of some Autodesk connection with this, but I wasn't able to track down the nature of the relationship, other than that they seems to be licensing something.

They say these things can handle something like 10k "bones". I'm imagining FEA on the fly.

To make this more interesting is the announcement of nVidia's "SLI Physics", where they can use a video card's GPU to d ohpysics calculations. Speculation is that SLI Physics is only for display effects, but there's no reason the data couldn't be read back from the card's memory.

Anyhow, it's a Good Thing. I can't wait to see how it all pans out.

Reply to
Dale Dunn

There was a guy at SWW trying to get interest in a board that took repetitive routines from software and ran them in hardware. Supposedly gave a 10x increase in speed. I'd have to see this to believe it. It would work with any software as long as the software vendor supported it.

Reply to
TOP

Maybe SolidWorks could supply a dedicated PCI card that improves SolidWorks performance, upgraded with each release and with flashable roms for the SP's. --- Now that could justify my yearly maintenance fees

John Layne

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Reply to
John Layne

That is what these guys had in mind. I suppose if I dug up the card from these guys and we got 100,000 enhancement requests for it they might consider it.

Reply to
TOP

Here's an article on harnessing the power of graphis cards!

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Regards Simon

Reply to
SM

Simon,

Thanks for that link! Yep, wouldn't it be kewl to put in a $250usd game card to do 10X plus processin and that sounds about right for what we need!? And, SW and Pro/e, in general, are sequential processes? Sheeze.. me want a GPUTeraSort,..too bad we're all dependent in AMD and Intel?!?!

damn..

Reply to
Paul Salvador

And of course massively parallel doesn't do SW much good.

Reply to
TOP

Yeah, this is what a PPU does as well so, for what they say, the I/O performance could be a start in helping more large data sets?!

I would wager that support for parallel programming, in support for high bandwidth hardware, is going to change in the future for engineering tools.

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Reply to
Paul Salvador

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