Ageia's Mobile Physx nets Dell, Medion

COUPLE OF MONTHS ago, we broke a story that Ageia was planning a major expansion of its line-up, and now this story has come to pass.

In the end, the first product to come to life is Physx in a form of MXM card. This card looks just like your regular MXM-II card, but the place of the GPU is occupied by Ageia's PPU. At the end of the day, it just made more financial sense to go with the OEM part alone, and get the adoption rate by OEMs first, instead of targeting end-users.

PhysX card in its mobile form

We also managed to learn the problem with PhysX and PCIe. It turned out that not all motherboards featuring PCIe x1 slot are compatible with PhysX card, but not in a way you would imagine. Loads of 1st generation motherboards with PCIe x1 slots do not adhere to PCIe x1 specification and there is quite a lot of jittering in signal, resulting in errors during operation.

Ageia's prototype PCI/PCIe card had issues with several popular motherboards and company decided not to risk the release of a product that might not be compatible with some users. Couple of card manufacturers confirmed this to us as well, but it all depends on what latency you require from the slot. Funky business indeed - reminded us of whole PCIe war between ATI and Nvidia, when ATI claimed and proved that Nvidia has a lot of signalling issues with GeForce PCX (first gen, NV3x based chips) cards. Nevertheless, that is all water under the bridge now.

Getting back to Mobile Physx, Ageia signed two companies here at the show, Dell and Medion.

Dell has remained elusive on which notebook will actually start using the Physx-enabled line-up, but we are sure a notebook codenamed "The Beast" will feature such a design. The Beast was supposed to launch here in Leipzig, but after all the shenanigans that Dell made with M1330; company opted to launch a product only when it can meet up with the demand for the product. And in the world of paper launches, this is actually quite a good call.

We suspect there are two MXM modules in this prototype of XPS M1730: one for graphics, one for Physx

You can expect official launch of Physx notebook in the next two to three weeks, depending on speed of manufacturing. µ