Intel buys Havok

Posted at: 11:06am 17th September 2007 by Alex Watson

Intel shells out for game physics firm

The Autumn Intel Developer Forum is taking place this week in San Francisco, and while the keynotes don't begin until tomorrow, Intel has made one big announcement already. It's buying Havok, the company famous for its physics software which makes the bodies and blown-up bits bounce realistically in many games, including recent top sellers such as Bioshock.


Havok will become a solely owned subsidiary of Intel, but according to the press release, will "continue to operate as an independent business working with its customers in developing digital media content."

As Charlie Demerjian from the Inquirer points out, it's an interesting and unexpected move from Intel. Havok was undertaking work on GPGPU, collaborating with both Nvidia and ATi on the much-hyped attempts to use graphics cards to process game physics. Whether this relationship will survive the Intel purchase is a big question. It's also unclear what Intel's move means for Ageia; on the one hand, for Intel to show such an interest in game physics and to back it up with a financial commitment certainly indicates it's a serious area of the market. However, Intel certainly isn't going to be interested in helping sell PhysX cards - running physics on multi-core processors will be far more of a priority.


You can read Intel's full press release here.