Intel Larrabee whitepaper discusses physics performance

Game physics is at the heart of any modern game engine which employs the laws of physics to simulate life-like movement and interaction between objects, such as rigid and deformable bodies, cloth, and water. Game physics applications are very compute and memory intensive. The ever growing quest for a high degree of realism requires more complex physics algorithms and also larger datasets. To meet the demands of game physics applications requires a computer architecture which can deliver high floating point performance and memory bandwidth. However, general-purpose many-core architectures are quickly evolving to overcome these constraints. Larrabee is one such highly-threaded many-core architecture. It consists of an array of multiple IA Intel processor cores, each augmented with a 16-wide vector processor unit. In this paper, we analyze several key game physics applications. We show how Larrabee’s extensive thread and data parallelism are well suited for a broad set of physics algorithms. We show how these algorithms parallelize and map to Larrabee architecture and achieve good parallel speedup with the number of cores.