ParallAX: an architecture for real-time physics

Thomas Y. Yeh, Petros Faloutsos, Sanjay J. Patel, Glenn Reinman

Abstract: Future interactive entertainment applications will featurethe physical simulation of thousands of interacting objectsusing explosions, breakable objects, and cloth effects. Whilethese applications require a tremendous amount of perfor-mance to satisfy the minimum frame rate of 30 FPS, thereis a dramatic amount of parallelism in future physics work-loads. How will future physics architectures leverage paral-lelism to achieve the real-time constraint?We propose and characterize a set of forward-looking bench-marks to represent future physics load and explore the de-sign space of future physics processors. In response to thedemand of this workload, we demonstrate an architecturewith a set of powerful cores and caches to provide perfor-mance for the serial and coarse-grain parallel components ofphysics simulation, along with a flexible set of simple coresto exploit fine-grain parallelism. Our architecture combinesintelligent, application-aware L2 management with dynamiccoupling/allocation of simple cores to complex cores. Fur-thermore, we perform sensitivity analysis on interconnectalternatives to determine how tightly to couple these cores