Havok to be acquired by Intel (!)

Thats what all companies hope for, grow the business, build it up to a good fat price and sell it off. I personally think its not a bad move. Intel have a huge presence in ireland already and now acquiring a company as good as havok only up the road, probably means their going to have a good partnership with intel. Congrats

WOW – That is definitely great news for Havok!

Regarding existing companies using it’s middleware, having Intel as the new owner is great – if the new owner had of been a company like EA ( who purchased RenderWare ), they would pretty much keep the technology for in-house usage only, leaving all prior clients with major issues for future titles.

The only potential issue might be the cross-platform one ( eg supporting Wii or future non-Intel platforms ), but Havok always had great customer support, so I’m sure they’ll continue to develop for all suitable platforms.

Mal

Hmm…will this enable Havok to become available at a lower costs maybe? Surely Intel would love it to be used as freely as DirectX if its optimised to work on their machines. This could benefit lots of people.
I dare not think about the cost of buying Havok…

I dare not think about the cost of buying Havok…[/quote:19fdf52ab9]

Thats a hard one alright. Havoks in like 50-60% probably more, games right?
So reckon its somewhere between this.

Activision buys Demonware for 15 million euro(been around about 4-5 years).
Microsoft buys Rare for 285 million Euro(been around 10-25 years.

So maybe 130-180 million euro? But im probably talking out my arse hole 8)

Some wild and uninformed speculation (My specialty :) )
Havok I believe have been working with both Nvidia and ATI to accelerate physics calculations on their GPUs. But I wonder could this move signal an interest from Intel in creating chips for dedicated physics processing units (PPUs) that would be optimised for the Havok routines. Ageia are the only company currently knocking out physics chips so maybe Intel sees this as niche it can expand into.

Some wild and uninformed speculation (My specialty :) )
Havok I believe have been working with both Nvidia and ATI to accelerate physics calculations on their GPUs. But I wonder could this move signal an interest from Intel in creating chips for dedicated physics processing units (PPUs) that would be optimised for the Havok routines. Ageia are the only company currently knocking out physics chips so maybe Intel sees this as niche it can expand into.[/quote:2da9f542e7]

exact thoughts here :)

I dare not think about the cost of buying Havok…[/quote:89a644497d]
"Intel has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the entire share capital of Havok in a cash transaction valued at approximately US$110 million subject to certain completion conditions. It is expected that the deal will close within 5 days."

well that is three acquisitions in the last two years – Upstart, Demonware and if confirmed now Havok….good to have good news for a change..

Aphra.

Interview with Dave OMeara RE: Intel
http://www.developmag.com/interviews/81/QA-Havok-boss-David-OMeara

Preparing Havok for mobile devices!!!! Sweeeeet.

I have to think twice when people say "Mobile devices" but seems Dave is indeed talking about those things you make calls on when not playing games.

Too many people call things like the psp and ds mobile when they mean to say portable or handheld and I don’t like calling mobiles handsets as those are for the TV. Resisting urge to just cave and call em cell phones but it is hard.

Anyway, I guess Havok will prob first look at Asian mobiles as they quite widely already have 3d acceleration chips, here not so much, maybe 10 super high end devices total which are half laptop kinda prices, oh btw thats how I measure the price of tech things, in laptops. 1 Laptop=100 Standard units of tech, the currency of nerds!:)

There is currently no decent physics solution for mobile so glad to hear this is on someones agenda and for it to be on Havoks all the better.

apparently things were all signed and sealed end of last week and there was a Havok party in Dublin to celebrate. If past experiences and stories are anything to go by it will have been a good one!

Aphra.