US chip developer Ageia has launched a version of its physics hardware engine for laptops that brings the power consumption down below 10W.
The 100M chip (pictured), launched this week at a games fair in Leipzig, Germany, is used to accelerate physics effects in games, and the company has co-developed a board with Dell for high end laptops.
It uses more accelerator blocks than the desktop version to allow a lower voltage and frequency to be used, but built in the same 130nm process used for the desktop part that ships in Dell, Acer and Medion gaming PCs.
The second generation chip adds more accelerator units and will ship early next year, said Michael Steele, vice-president of marketing. "What we have learned is the architecture is good and it’s more about the games and software, and that’s where we have concentrated," he said.
Over half the engineers in the company work on a middleware software that allows game developers to write to the physics engine. This is being used in a version of the open source gaming engine from Unreal that will drive the free Tournament 3 game.
An architecture is also being developed for non-gaming uses.