Intel Acquires Havok
From a business standpoint, Havok is an attractive property since the company's technology is seeing greater demand, both for PC games as well as consoles (Havok 5 actually includes additional support for the Wii). And the support of Intel's formidable research and development team, as well as optimization for the Intel development platform, will likely benefit Havok. Another potential beneficiary of this deal is Ageia, a rival physics technology company. Ageia is quite different from Havok; instead of a software suite, Ageia uses a separate processor, dubbed PhysX, to offload gaming physics from the PC's CPU. The approach may be different for Ageia, but the results are the same kind of realistic, eye-popping physics. And while Ageia doesn't have the track record of Havok, the company has been gaining traction recently with titles like Gears of War, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas. Ageia PhysX will also be used for the highly anticipated Unreal Tournament 3.
Epic's Unreal Tournament 3 will utilize Ageia's PhysX technology. Will Intel's purchase of Havok lead more developers to Ageia or fewer?
It's worth noting that both Havok and Ageia have a significant presence in the console market, which is currently foreign territory for Intel. How Intel's acquisition will affect Havok's console business is indeed a large question mark. Intel will surely want to focus Havok's attention on PC gaming, but it seems unlikely that, with the size of the growing console market and amount of dollars involved, Havok will abandon consoles completely. Still, anything that puts an emphasis on PC gaming instead of the next-gen consoles these days will be seen as a positive by the PC gaming crowd.
The potential loser in the Intel-Havok deal is none other than AMD, of course. The addition of Havok gives Intel another attractive feature for its growing gaming platform. While Havok had worked closely with both ATI and Nvidia and the company will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary, it's possible that over time Intel will move Havok away from AMD and ATI. That could result in AMD turning its attention to Ageia for physics support or simply trying to develop its own physics technology in house, which is something that both ATI and Nvidia have been flirting with.
How will Havok play into Intel's future chipsets and platforms? It's likely that Havok's technology is going to play some role for Intel's forthcoming GPU, codenamed Larrabee. This could hurt Havok's relationship with Nvidia, too, since Larrabee could very well signal that Intel sees its GPU partner as increasingly expendable. Then again, spurning Nvidia will no doubt upset PC gamers who prefer and Intel-Nvidia platform, so it's unlikely that Intel would take such a drastic step. Instead, the Havok deal looks to tilt Intel and Nvidia's "coopetition" relationship more toward the competition end.
Havok may also play a factor in Intel's response on AMD's Fusion effort, which plans to combine AMD processors with ATI's GPUs in a single hardware unit. Of course, the bigger question is how will graphics, physics and general CPU technology be combined going forward? Will we see a three-processor scheme with a CPU, GPU and physics processor, like Ageia? Or are we moving toward one combined hardware set, and if so, what will the benefits be? Those are some weighty long term questions. In the short term, look for a response from Nvidia, AMD and possibly Ageia to Intel's aggressive move into the world of physics technology.
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