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The rendar farm however still uses a mixture of SUNs and SGI

Well maybe. Pixar switched to RackSaver Linux blade servers for their renderfarm about a year ago. Their website still lists them as clients though that could have changed.

Pixar switches from Sun to Intel
RackSaver Customers

Well if anything you can't fault VFX with the story. But yes each prequel had over 2000 VFX shots. You have to read the article though, last film Weta did about 800 VFX shots and for this they are doing upwards of 1200. As their technology matures (Massive, muscle dynamics, subsurface scattering) you can even throw more things at to the VFX.

It certainly is a big setup, they are adding 1,176 new processors to what they already had (which was stated in an article some time ago). Probably ILM and Imageworks have a bit more though. The article says that they have the largets Intel deployment, but places like ILM and Imageworks, besides their Intel/Linux machine still have quite bit of SGI hardware around. An article on the SGI websitye a couple years back stated ILM had an 800 CPU Origin 2000 machine, and around 500 O2s. Since then a lot of the TDs, animators and compositors have gotten Dell Linux workstations and several of them keep the 2 machines side by side (the O2 and the Dell). ILM and Pixar also recently added to their renderfarm via RackSaver:

Pixar switches from Sun to Intel
Racksaver testimonials
AMD debuts server processor, readies 'Barton'
SGI Powers 5 Summer films

It certainly is nice that New Line is paying for this though. I'm sure other studios are envious ;-).

By the way, if anyone is interested in TPC-C benchmarks of the Opteron, it can be seen here. It is interesting to see such a small player like Rackserver among big boys like IBM, HP and Fujitsu.

The only thing the article references is that Newisys is leading the charge, but I don't see anything I would consider a source. Racksaver is claiming that evaluation units are available now, but mostly there's just a lot of Opteron Server Evaluation signups. Does anyone have any real information? Cost? Non-evaluation release? Anything?

Actually, according to the article, they're using neither, but rather Racksaver.

That's what I thought too (about a possible typo) but who knows. A few days ago I posted a story about how ILM was using AMD systems on their renderfarm from RackSaver, which also does Xeon systems. At least it shows that RackSaver knows how to work with those types of customers, and besides ILM and Pixar are relatively close.

These guys have had terrible reputations with faulty crap in the past BUT I have had no problem with them.

racksaver.com

-davidu

After a bit of searching I found this: BladeRack its not cheap, $4999 base price.
Here is a file server case that will take 2 motherboards: Model C1620RATX

The Gigabyte 7DXR takes 3 DDR DIMMS with the AMD 760.

In fact for 3 DDR DIMMs there are many boards you can use.

Try this Socket A mobo database

Look on Pricewatch for the best prices on RAM, 512MB PC2100, which has just dropped below $600.

So thats a 2GB Athlon box you can make for a little over $3000.

But for you've purposes a dual palomino sounds ideal. Try this one: On preorder from Rack Saver