intia
Latest
Stand-alone AI card: is it viable?
Upstart company AIseek has announced the Intia processor, the "first dedicated processor for artificial intelligence (AI)" according to its website. The website promises better terrain analysis, line-of-sight calculations, and path finding capabilities. The website offers demo videos to download, but they all seem to be offline right now (Ars Technica saw a video and was impressed).Theoretically, the card is a great idea in the vein of Ageia's PhysX card -- who doesn't hate the lackadaisical AI found in today's games? But, as Engadget points out, it suffers from the chicken/egg dilemma: no customer will buy the card until games are made that utilize it, but no developer will make a game utilizing Intia unless it already has an installed base. The best bet for AIseek would be to lobby console makers to get its chip included in the next generation -- some of the earliest 3D cards found success because of their inclusion in PlayStation and Nintendo 64. No one would purchase an AI processor out of support for the idea alone; the technology is great, but what high-profile developer would take the risk and program excess code for a small, possibly nonexistent, audience?[via Engadget]
AIseek's Intia Processor provides dedicated AI crunching
With competition for those spare PCI slots already hot between dedicated sound, physics, and even network cards -- all promising to offload some CPU cycles to speed frame rates and enhance performance -- you've gotta hand it to AIseek for pushing out their new Intia "AI processor" in such a climate. The way it's looking from here, we just need more PCI slots, since the AIseek promises all sorts of Artificial Intelligence leetness that just needs to be had. They're saying that they can accelerate low-level AI tasks 200x compared to a lone CPU, giving NPCs better terrain analysis, line-of-sight sense, path finding and the like. AIseek also guarantees NPCs will be able to find the optimal path in any game that uses the chip, pathfinding abilities we've gone without for too long. Basically: more baddies, less stupidity. Unfortunately, the "chip" doesn't quite seem to exist in anything close to a retail form -- AIseek mainly seems to be after VC money right now -- and of course there's always the chicken and the egg problem being experienced by PhysX of no games until people buy the card, and nobody will buy the card without games. All the same, we're hoping for good things from this technology, and would recommend you peep the read link for some simulations of the AI in action.[Via Ars Technica]
