Finally!!! News to be excited about! Now a hardware Physics Processing Unit for games is definitely a hot idea. It fits right into my vision of a future computer composed of various pieces of very specialized hardware.

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050308_214530.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21648

We already have a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) that has offloaded some of the work load from the CPU when it comes to graphics related processing. In the latest versions of the nVidia chips, they've also included hardware accelerated video processing with their GPUs, so it seems that in the near future, almost all graphics related issues will be offloaded to the GPU. Creative Labs pretty much along with nVidia's soundStorm technology created a Audio Processing Unit (APU) for nothing, but audio, so that's covered. Then the CPU is just left for general computation and mathematics. However, the PPU will further offload some of that and do it with much more accuracy and efficiency. So, I'm waiting for the day where the CPU, motherboard, and RAM get all integrated into one small package and sold as a Central Processing Unit or Mother Unit. Then we just plug-in whatever other units we need into it, like a GPU, APU, PPU, or dedicated storage control unit (STU), etc. Takes modularity to a different level. However, back to the topic of PPU, it sure looks promising if you ask me, but like most things new, everyone will be skeptical.

Once again, I believe that versatility, performance and stability are things you can't all have at once. You want versatility and you sacrifice some of the other two. You want performance, then you may lose stability and maybe not as much versatility. But if you want stability, you will definitely have to sacrifice the prior two.
- posted by Sai @ 1:06 AM