Surfing around the net today, you may have run into stories proclaiming that AMD is about to purchase Ageia in a move to counter Intel’s purchase of Havok.  As we found out earlier in the week Intel plans to remove Havok from physics on a graphics card research, either to stop the research entirely, or to change their focus to Intel CPUs.  It also makes sense that AMD would purchase Ageia to stop nVIDIA from getting their hands on the physics processor producer, and give them a leg up on physics processing in general.  AMD’s purchase of Transmeta certainly helped them with die shrinkage, and it would give them the capability to produce CPUs, GPUs and PPUs.

This is all based off of a remark in an interview given to CustomPC by AMD’s head of developer relations, Richard Huddy.  The comment, ‘we’ve had that discussion, yes. It’s a discussion that goes round every three months – someone turns to me and says ‘why don’t we buy Ageia?’ and I go through the arguments about why we should and why we shouldn’t.’  turns out to mean exactly what it says.  AMD has thought about to pluses and minuses of buying Ageia, but have no plans to, at least right now.  You can read the his exact reply to these rumours at The Inquirer.

No GPGPPU for you, at least until Ageia realizes that while they are an attractive buy for nVIDIA, AMD and others, they need to work on their asking price.  Perhaps they should offer a mail in rebate?