Patent ID: 7895411

Claim:
A dedicated, hardware-based physics processing unit (PPU) that is coupled to an external memory, comprising: an internal memory; a floating point engine (FPE) that includes a vector processor adapted to perform multiple, parallel floating point operations to generate physics data, wherein the multiple, parallel floating point operations are specified by a very long instruction word (VLIW) that is issued to the FPE; a PPU control engine (PCE) configured to control the overall operation of the PPU by allocating memory resources within the internal memory to the FPE and distributing commands received from a host central processing unit (CPU) to the FPE for processing; a data movement engine (DME) configured to control the movement of data between the external memory and the internal memory in response to instructions received from the PCE; and a data communication circuit adapted to communicate the physics data to the host CPU.