Ageia Physx

[alanschu]

What is a SPU?

A "Synergistic Processing Unit". It's a processor with a large amount of brute force but a lot less intelligence (that is why it needs an army of programmers to extract its full performance). The PS3's Cell is made up of of 1 PPU (Principal Processing Unit?) and 7 of these SPUs.

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I think it's Primary Processing Unit.

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Well, Primary and Principal would be synonyms in this context.

[alanschu]

Geneally it means Physics P.U.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_processing_unit

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Only if you're restricting your definition to the Aegia marketting people. You also just pointed out a great weakness of Wikipedia.

 

PPU is also the acronym used to describe the primary processor, based on the Power technology, that IBM is using in their Cell processor. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

 

Generally, (as in when talking with IT people, or anyone who isn't aware of the Ageia card, about this sort of stuff), it usually corresponds to the IBM usage, not the Aegia one.

 

 

It most certainly is the usage that angshuman was using.

Edited January 17, 2006 by alanschu

[karka]

Well, since the fist person who used PPU term in this thread is me, i wanted to explain it for my posts. I used PPU for Physics. I just wanted to write that.

Edited January 17, 2006 by karka

[alanschu]

Fair enough. It was just that your clarification came directly after two other people were clarifying what PPU meant.

 

 

 

I'm not much of a fan of calling things GPUs and PPUs and whatnot, as it starts to make things get confusing. I've always been Graphics Chip and expect to be Physics chip. But hey, that's just me.

 

Hopefully I don't get too confused, because my PPU experience is definitely with respect to the Cell processor. Thanks for the clarification.