Intel to acquire Havok News
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Intel is to acquire videogame and movie software specialist Havok, GamesIndustry.biz reports.
Havok's software and services are used in some of the biggest franchises in videogames, in titles such as Half-Life 2, BioShock, Crackdown and MotorStorm, as well as Hollywood blockbusters The Matrix, Kingdom of Heaven and Charlie and the Chocolate factory.
"Intel's scale of technology investment and customer reach enable Havok with opportunities to grow more quickly into new market segments with new products than we could have done organically," commented David O'Meara, CEO of Havok.
"We believe the winning combination is Havok's technology and customer know-how with Intel's scale. This is a great fit for Havok products, customers and employees," he added.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Havok will now become a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel and will continue to be run as an independent business.
"Havok will operate its business as usual, which will allow them to continue developing products that are offered across all platforms in the industry," commented Renee J. James, VP and general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions Group.
"Havok is a proven leader in physics technology for gaming and digital content, and will become a key element of Intel's visual computing and graphics efforts," said James.
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Comments: 1-12 of 12 in total
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Super_Sonic
17/09/07 @ 08:35
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Yeah. People are always very surprised that Havok hails from Dublin. Hoping Intel don't mess up the company too much with their meddling.
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Carrybagma
17/09/07 @ 09:28
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So. Which next-gen console will have an Intel GPGPU (or GPGPUs) in it? Guesses please.
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Guessing a little integrated physics chip intended for out-of-the-box motherboards is in the works. Or maybe not; multi-core CPU's seems to be in vogue; dedicated physics calculation could be a smart way make better use of some of all those cores.
Extremely bad news for Ageia PhysX, but mostly good for gamers, I believe. Software that utilises one core (or more) for physics, a few for AI and so on could make for better games, eventually. Intel has never really bothered too much with the gamer market; the integrated graphics chips they make are pretty much useless for gaming (I call it "integrated craphics"). I am guessing that the purchase of Havok was mostly motivated by other factors than the potential use of the technology in games. But who knows. It has become a pretty big market, games.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 17/09/07 @ 10:36
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It seems an odd decision to me, one of the major selling points of middleware such as havok is that you write your code to its API and you don't have to worry about optimising (that bit at least) for Intel/AMD/PowerPC etc.
If intel cripple support for other platforms they will do themselves out of a market and someone platform agnostic (possibly Ageia if they maintain the quality of their software only engine) will eat their lunch. If they don't optimise havok for intel platforms, then what's the point in buying them? |
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Carrybagma
17/09/07 @ 12:42
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@bad: A new (Intel-based) 'platform'? I wonder if they're already in talks with Microsoft..
Perhaps it's just spoiling tactics from a cash-rich company, but I do wonder if we're seeing a piece of next-gen slipping into place. |
Comments: 1-12 of 12 in total
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