Chief Architect, AGEIA Technologies Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Wu & Chen Auditorium, 3-4pm
Tuesday, November 6th
Abstract
In early 2005, AGEIA introduced the notion of an accelerator card for
physical simulation of video games. Since then, there has been a rush
of activity from several major semiconductor vendors to jump onto the
physics bandwagon. This is another example of how the semiconductor
economy is responding to the "data scale" world, driven by the video
games at its base, and extending into a revitalized workstation market.
Gaming is bringing supercomputing technology to the masses, with 3D
graphics and physics as the primary drivers. These economic factors are
causing a new inflection point in the computing landscape that affect
the way CPUs will be architected. In this talk we'll examine these
factors, and the interesting challenges of designing chips for physics.
We'll take a deep dive into the architecture of the AGEIA PhysX chip,
and examine the forces that are driving the evolution of the AGEIA PhysX
Architecture.
Biography
Sanjay J. Patel is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer
Engineering and Willett Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, where he pursues his research interest in designing
ultra high-performance architectures.
Sanjay is also Chief Technology Officer at AGEIA Technologies,
overseeing the architecture and design of AGEIA's high-performance ASICs
for accelerating physical simulation in video games.
He is the co-author (with Yale Patt of The University of Texas at
Austin) of an introductory textbook for computer science and engineering
students, titled "Introduction to Computing Systems: From Bits and Gates
to C and Beyond", which is now available in its second edition from
McGraw-Hill.
Patel earned his Bachelor (1990), Master of Science (1992) and PhD
(1999) in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor.
