AMD can’t really do business with Havok anymore because rival company Intel scooped up the physics developer back in September.
But that doesn’t mean AMD is out of the acquisition game; in fact, AMD has been considering purchasing AGEIA, a rival physics developer, for several months now.
Richard Huddy, head of developer relations for AMD, told Custom PC, "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."
It’s kind of interesting though, AMD considered purchasing Havok, but the price was too high. My guess is that AMD is still reeling from the $5.4 billion purchase of ATI back in July.
Huddy said, "Our biggest problem is that Havok reputedly cost in excess of $100 million. If I’d been valuing Havok, I’d have valued it at probably something like 10 percent of that because they were in so much trouble in the marketplace."
Now that Havok is out of the independent picture, AGEIA’s market value certainly increased and I’m sure many companies are eager to scoop them up. Huddy commented, "I bet the same thing has gone through the minds of Nvidia and the other companies that play in this marketplace."
Even though AGEIA’s PhysX chip hasn’t been widely embraced, its free PhysX software has; for example, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 supports the PhysX technology. Also free games have been released that support and advertise the PhysX technology, such as NetDevil’s Warmonger. In the future, I wouldn’t rule out someone purchasing AGEIA.
