Parallax: An Architecture For Real-Time Physics

Future interactive entertainment applications will feature the physical simulation of thousands of interacting objects using explosions, breakable objects, and cloth effects. While these applications require a tremendous amount of performance to satisfy the minimum frame rate of 30 FPS, there is a dramatic amount of parallelism in future physics workloads. How will future physics architectures leverage parallelism to achieve the real-time constraint?We propose and characterize a set of forward-looking benchmarks to represent future physics load and explore the design space of future physics processors. In response to the demand of this workload, we demonstrate an architecture with a set of powerful cores and caches to provide performance for the serial and coarse-grain parallel components of physics simulation, along with a flexible set of simple cores to exploit fine-grain parallelism. Our architecture combines intelligent, application-aware L2 management with dynamic coupling/allocation of simple cores to complex cores. Furthermore, we perform sensitivity analysis on interconnect alternatives to determine how tightly to couple these cores.