[ODE] Future of physics processors and IM API

[Jon Watte]

> So the Novodex API definitely has a role to play as the technology matures.
> Whether it will still be the right thing to use in five years, I don't know,
> but Ageia has to start somewhere.  We know a lot less about how to do

Novodex also has two other nice properties:

- it works in software mode when no hardware is present
- it allegedly scales well on SMP systems (such as dual-core)

This means that developers can write to a single API, and ship an 
application that just runs better when you have the PhysX chip 
installed. Glide never did software emulation, right?

AFAICT, the PhysX chip is basically a parallel SIMD computation 
CPU, somewhat less general than an x86, but still Turing capable. 
This probably means that you COULD write an ODE accelerator for 
it, if you had the specs and a lot of time. Although the ODE API 
may be less parallelized than Novodex, so your app may gain less 
from doing so.

Cheers,

			/ h+