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Pixar Switches to Mac OS X and G5s
fmorgan writes "No big surprise here: when Apple introduced the G5 at 2003 WWDC, it become more a question of 'when' Pixar will move to G5s, than 'if'). At the same conference, Apple showed a new codec for Mac OS X named 'Pixlet,' developed with Pixar. In last year O'Reilly's Mac OS X conference, there was a presentation on how Pixar moved their desktop/office environment to Mac OS X. Now it seems it's the main production work: 'Apple's Don Peebeles said that Pixar has used Linux and Intel-based architecture in 2003, but that Pixar was switching to Mac OS X and G5 workstations for its production work: Peebles went on to say that this switch was "a move that no doubt made common CEO Steve Jobs very happy."'"
I seem to remember someone from Pixar saying that they were moving over to G5 work stations. As for the Render Farm I believe they just purchased a whole lot of 2.8Ghz Xeons (if I remember correctly) and so it would probably not make sense for them to go and buy a ton of Macs for that right at the moment. Besides Steve knows when Apple's upgrade schedule is. They will buy Dual 3Ghz or 4Ghz Xserves before they need to render the next Pixar release I bet.
Pixar isn't changing the farm. As for RenderMan, the current release is already available for OSX in a beta form.
This isn't Jurassic Park.
Plus, they only had a 117 Sun workstations in the original Toy Story render farm.
Disney's "Toy Story" Uses More Than 100 Sun Workstations to Render Images for First All-Computer-Based Movi
I've heard of renderman and recall the pixar ppl have developers actively contributing to Linux.
Will this affect Linux development in any significant way?
I use a G5 at work but I don't use it for anything that might be affected by this. It's mostly a number cruncher/web browser.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Virginia Tech's "Big Mac" has proved the G5 to be very powerful in a cluster.
umm.. the G5 isn't a consumer machine. It is a professional workstation. Apple's consumer machines are the iBook/eMac/iMac. Pretty much Anything with an X or Power infront of it are professional machines.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Oh puhleez, that's so 1999! Have you priced out performance / price ratios for tier 1 manufacturers? G5's do smackingly well, especially against Dells and the like, often coming out much cheaper before considering things like support costs and reliability and resale. Pixar isn't going to build their own bargain bin beige boxes. Look at VirginiaTech's shopping research, they paid full price to Apple and it was still cheaper/faster than Dell.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Actually more modern Intel processors run an 800mhz frontside bus.
However, your point is well taken that the G5 architecture seems to impliment a better memory architecture.
What about this?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
The default size of the install is not what defines bloatware. If Windows XP came with every game and every Application that was made for the PC, that wouldn't necessarily be bloatware.
Bloatware is when a product has so many _useless_ features that cause it to be large. (IE. Microsoft Office, Open Office)
Is linux bloated because you can install a good 4 CDs worth of stuff on your system install? No. You have options. And you have a wide variety of applications and tools at your disposal.
Your pipe isn't fat enough. I was doing an audit of GTE billing in the late 90's and was looking for some of the biggest bills. Sure enough Dreamworks had a very large bill for their pipes (something like 30 OC-3's or something). Pretty big for a non-telco related company.
Note: my memory isn't that good so if someone wants to shed some more detail I'd be interested in an update!
IIRC, the G5 can outperform a comparable x86 processor in one area - floating point operations.
For rendering, floating point operations are probably the most important thing for a rendering farm.
(disclaimer: i did say IIRC)
Here you go dumbass.
They contribute back to GCC, BSD, etc. They don't however give their GUI Cocoa/Carbon away for free to OSS. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you don't want people using free software to enhance their products, don't release it as OSS.
I hate when people bitch about someone following the license software is released under. BTW, did you build BSD? Didn't think so.
Opterons on the other hand have an integrated memory controller on die, and each cpu in a multi-cpu system has its path to core memory.
I suppose you could just get all single cpu machines, but that would be even more expensive than multi-cpu Xeons, and far more expensive than the Opterons... Erik
Actually, It might outperform a beowulf cluster in some sense. With the Beowulf cluster, you have to set up nodes for processing and typically aren't user nodes. The scheduler will queue up tasks to the nodes as they are requested. However, Apple still has their XGrid technology lurking around Pixar I'm sure. With XGrid, all the machines act as a cluster where Mac's with free processes to spare can work on computations for other nodes. Also, the G5's altivec provides a definite performance boost since most of the work is render work which is probably easill parallelized/verctorized. Just from checking the Apple website (yeah, I'm sure it is biased) for the HPC LINPACK benchmarks, the XServe Dual 2GHz G5 is 9GFlops where as the DUAL 2GHz opteron is 5.91 GFlops. Just my $0.02
Good luck convincing a jury that you switched to a 2- to 3-times as expensive per seat hardware/software platform and it had nothing to do with the fact that the same guy is CEO at both companies.
from apple's shake page
Shake 3 For Mac OS X $4,950.00
Shake 3 is also available for Linux for a suggested retail price of $9,900 (US) with an annual maintenance of $1485 (US). Render-only versions of Shake 3 are free on Mac OS X and are available for Linux for a suggested retail price of $3,900 (US) with an annual maintenance of $585 (US).
even after buying a loaded dual g5 (composite workstation) or a xserve (rendering) facilities are saving money by switching to apple. Shake is also more stable on Mac than Linux.
(yes, i realize pixar deals mostly in 3d and not compositing, however, most VFX facilities do both)