Chairman and chief executive of AGEIA, a startup that develops processors for processing physics in games and other application, said in an interview that the company’s physics processing units (PPUs) are capable of operating in parallel, which potentially allows to get increased performance of physics not only in machines used by gamers, but also in certain professional or scientific applications.

Answering a question of OverClocker.cl web-site whether it was possible to use two PPUs in parallel, Mr. Manju Hegde said that AGEIA PhysX processor was a highly parallelized architecture and it could be possible to use a number of them in parallel in order to increase performance of physics by a single computer.

Mr. Hegde declined to reveal any details about the potential capability. For instance, he did not reveal how several physics processors are going to share the load and get synchronized with the rest of the system, for instance, with graphics cards and central processing units.

Mr. Hegde also said that there were many possible uses for the PhysX technology, such as digital content creation, film, scientific research. However, the company, he claimed, planned “to crawl” first and focus on the gaming market.

AGEIA’s PhysX is the world’s first Physics Processing Unit (PPU), which offloads software physics processing from central processing units and graphics processing units to it. The architecture of the PhysX PPU is tailored for multi-threaded processing of vertexes, which allows game creators to develop detailed, soft and precise animation and simulation of movements, hair, clothing, liquids, fluids and other. Currently AGEIA PhysX is the world’s first and only dedicated physics processing unit, but the company expects more startups to offer similar technology.

The cards based on the new AGEIA PhysX processor will start sampling in Q3 2005, and when they appear in retail in Q4 their price is supposed to be between $249 and $299, it was revealed earlier this year.