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Pixar Switching to Mac OS X
DavidRavenMoon writes "MacCentral reports that Pixar technologist Dr. Michael Johnson says Linux, Sun and Windows-based systems are being replaced by Mac OS X. 'The studio's entire team uses Mac OS X not only for creative work, but for workflow and custom application development.'"
Keeping track of which is the desk-lamp and wich one is the computer is going to get difficult.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
well is it? If you owned a computer company, and you owned a company that uses a whole lot of computers, wouldn't you want your own company useing your own products?
It wasn't long ago that Pixar actually started to make the switch to Linux, it was reported in several places. Has Steve Jobs given an edict? While it might be fine it sounds rather abrupt. I wonder if everyone is satisfied.
Here is the quote from the CGW article from September 2001 (which requires free registration):
Here is the link:
Linux Invades Hollywood
The most puzzling thing is if they plan to substitute the SUN renderfarm, as one of the things they like is that they can pack a lot of power in slim racks (14 CPUs on each last time I heard). Maybe they got more space at Emmeryville now ;-). As recent as last holiday season SUN touted its hardware shortly after the release of Monster's Inc.:
SUN story on Monsters Inc.
Tom Duff sometimes posts around here, maybe he can comment? It's rather interesting.
This would help cut down on overall staffing costs, because rather then have a base of dedicated Unix/Solaris admins and Windows NT admins and Linux admins (or whatever combo of that). They can just use a single platform for all of it, and the best part for them is the interface is Mac. No offense to artists (my wife is one), but they aren't the most tech savvy, so the Mac enviornment (which sheilds em pretty well) is whats best for em and gives them a warm fuzzy.
At least Steve is backing his own products now. Real question is how long have Pixar being using clusters of the new rack-mounted systems? Or testing any other nice hardware. With many render farms being linux (or other nix) based, OS X does seem like an ideal solution given powerful enough hardware. You can create a solid workflow of machine on a common platform that just about everyone in the team can use. OS X does after all have a friendly GUI as well as the powerfull backend. :)
Guess renderman is on Darwin/OS X now too then
Yes this does seem all fine and predictable given that Steve Jobs is CEO/iCEO of both. But really the interesting part is how long it took.
I hate to keep bringing up Microsoft, I really do, but remember when hotmail was bought by MS? Right away MS forced them to convert their Sun servers to NT. And, remember all the problems that resulted?
What is really impressive then about Pixar switching to Mac OS X is that Steve J let them wait until OS X could do everything Pixar needed.
....and go straight to the original story:. html
http://developer.apple.com/wwdc2002/pixar
One interesting thing to remember is that Pixar software used to run on NeXT. They probably pulled some code out of the archives as part of work on Mac OS X.
Steve Jobs has announced that he himself will be personally doing most of the end user desktop tech-support. This move alone is expected to lower the number of internal Pixar reported trouble reports to near 0.0%.
~jeff
I wonder if the recent announcement of Apple making rackmount computers has anything to do with this.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I can't imagine that it would be too difficult for pixar to port their current rendering software over to OS X... plus it would be a great advantage for pixar (having the connection through steve jobs to apple), as they would almost be guaranteed apple's top notch technology. (or is this a false assumption?).
While the depth to which pixar will be using macs is unclear, I'm just glad that they're starting to make the transition: OS X has great potential, and I think we'll see the hardware catch up sometime soon. (holding my breath...) This would yield a very powerful OS on top of a very strong hardware setup.
-braxton
Sorry, but in defense of the Mac, I've seen real world examples where many of the best programmers in the world were Mac users. And Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the Web, used NeXT, which is basically Mac OS X today. Okay, there are differences, but the concepts are the same.
Sorry, but the rumor about Mac-heads/artists not being technical simply isn't true. Heck, if it was, there wouldn't be an "Apple" section on one of the most technical discussion boards [apple.slashdot.org] around, would there?
Just wanted to dispel rumors that really are *hack-cough-wheeze* unfounded, in many cases. But, don't worry, rumors are that way: unfounded.
Apple's top notch technology wouldn't be good for the renderfarms. Those are all about speed, and the fastest Mac is about half as fast as the fastest PC. And Macs really fall short on memory-intensive tasks in dual processor configurations, owing to the slower bus speed. (The fastest Mac memory bus is 133MHz. The fastest PC bus is effectively over 1GHz.)
Even if Pixar got the Macs for free and had to pay market price for the PC racks, it's likely that the cost of electricity from the additional machines needed would take away the Apple benefit in under two years. This is to say nothing of extra maintenance when there are twice as many machines, the value of the extra space used, and the cost of porting the render farm software over to the new system architecture.
Macintosh G4 computers may have half the processor clock speed of Intel-based computers. However, due to their more efficient RISC architecture, and the "Velocity Engine" vector-math unit, they are capable of performing complex graphic operations much faster than equivalently priced Intel-based computers -- two to three times as fast in some cases.
The computing needs of Pixar undoubtedly rely heavily on vector math. Therefore, using a computer architecture that is expressly optimized for vector math is probably a good idea for them.
Don't fall into the fallacy of equating clock speed with performance.
Sure, he may be arrogant, but Pixar's bot the kind of thing you just monkey around with on a whim. It's a huge moneymaker, and they're extremely well-respected in the industry. Jobs isn't going to just order them to switch to OS X unless it's viable.
Undoubtedly, the upcoming rackmount servers probably play a role, although I'd be surprised if they plan on using Macs for rendering.
Chances are Jobs worked out a deal with Pixar where they'd get assistance porting their current software to OS X (since their software is Linux based, I'm guessing it's a bit easier to port to OS X than the old Windows code), and get to play with new hardware and such, in exchange for the great PR Apple gets in announcing that Pixar is using OS X. And of course, buckets of money are undoubtedly involved. Aren't they always?
Vector math and bandwidth. All current Mac designs are utterly choked when dealing with large data sets, owing to the 133MHz RAM clock.
If you want a good idea of the relative speeds for render farms, take a look at some Maya benchmarks. The 933MHz G4s with 2MB L2 cache realize about 2/3 the speed of 1GHz Intel chips, and about half the speed of 1GHz AMD parts.
I don't know how well-tuned Maya is for the G4 vector instructions, but one would expect that Pixar would have less of a programming budget for these kinds of optimazations than a company who's actually selling the software in a competitive market.
PIXAR is selling their software. The Renderman Toolkit that is used by many of the top animation and effects studios is developed and sold by PIXAR. It has also run on several different platforms in the past (including both 68K and PPC Macs as well as NeXT/OpenStep based systems). They also developed and maintain their own in-house animation software which they use instead of other's programs (such as Maya).
Actually, they basically started making animated films to showcase their software.
May 14th
GPL Deconstructed