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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."'"
After all, with Jobs as CEO of both companies, why wouldn't Apple be used for Pixar's needs, especially if they're capable? An american kiritsu?
I don't see this as big news. It would be big news, if, say, they moved to a linux distribution (considering that Jobs is CEO of both Pixar and Apple, and linux could be seen as a competitor to Apple). This is nothing more than free publicity for apple, and probably an "at-cost" transaction for Pixar for new hardware and software.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Not necessarily. Forget the Linux evangelism for a moment and remember that Apple makes some damn good hardware, regardless of anyone's opinion of the company or their software. Making animated movies of the sort that Pixar produces would certainly be very hardware-intensive. I think it just makes sense.
Except that Steve wouldn't have made the change if it were not cost effective. He's a businessman, and the kiddies that like his fancy animated fish don't care if it was rendered or developed on a Mac or not. At some point, the compute power of the G5, please the ease of installation and ongoing maintenance made it worthwhile to switch.
In all actuality, he probably didn't even request that his company do this - its not the kind of thing a CEO tends to think about. His CTO probably did the evaluations and ran the numbers...
Apple hardware is tied to the OS when you buy it. It's the same reason why Apple will never port OS X to x86 - Apple's a hardware company first, using the software to help sell the hardware. Either way, I'm sure Apple's selling the systems to Pixar at-cost anyway, so it's not like it's going to add to the cost, and OS X is a worthy Unix system that happens to have a rather pretty interface on top. So the question is more why wouldn't they go with OS X?
If we're talking about open-source alternatives to Mac OS X, we could also talk about open-source stuff that's relatively compatible with Mac OS X at the non-GUI level, and runs on x86. :) Maybe they could keep all the Xeons in their render farm, and just install Darwin on them, then the back-end apps could run on both Xeon and Mac.
SGI hardware is expensive and not so far ahead these days, many have been replacing SGI boxes for Macs and Linux boxes.
Just as likely not, he may want to keep clean hands on this one for credibility. Remember that the high-profile VirginiaTech project had tons more marketroid benefits for Apple but the whole deal was basically retail. They wouldn't have to get discounts for this decision fo fly anyway, the price/performance&quality ratio is favourable.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I know you're making a joke, but since gambling winnings are taxable, shouldn't gambling losses be deductable?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You apparently were not using Hotmail back when they got purchased by Microsoft. When they first tried to switch the servers to Windows, they couldn't come close to handling the load.
It works perfectly now, but it was a disaster at the time.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
In the real world you spend money to get the tools you need. It always gets me when I hear someone outside the industry complain about how much a copy of Photoshop costs- it's professional software, and it's a necessity. It costs that much because it's worth it.
With the level of success Pixar has had, money isn't the issue- quality is. They can easily afford a couple million in equipment and software. What they can't afford to do is to produce inferior work.
Except that Apple makes quite a lot of hardware. Microsoft doesn't make much hardware (keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc), while SCOG was a software company (as Caldera) but is now a litigation company.
Why select a slower, more expensive platform and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
Because for the applications Pixar has in mind, G5 Macs are neither slower nor more expensive. It's really that simple. G5s deliver the best bang for the buck in the video editing world, period.
I would really, really like to see the "Macs are more expensive" meme disappear from these arguments. They're not more expensive than PCs of comparable power and quality, and haven't been for years.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The Apple model is the sale of hardware. The proof of this was when Jobs killed the clones. Software freedom has meant: more apps for the Mac. I don't think Jobs is against that.
G5's with optimized software being slower for production work is debatable. You haven't seen the next generation of hardware yet, they already have a 1GHz bus, and these production machines have enormous internal bandwidth requirements. Use one for video or 3D work sometimes, then come back here and complain about their speed.
more expensive platform
Since these are production machines, they need to be very reliable and plug-it-in and go. Make me a machine with the same level of reliability, quiet, power requirements, speed, connectivity, and production capabilities with equivalent warranty then let's compare pricing. Never mind, I just finished a committee-based 3-week shopping grind for similar production requirements and I already know the answer: apple hardware wins by about 5% on price alone, and still spec's out better for multimedia production. Oh, and ROI in terms of productivity, support, and longevity.
and take on the cost of porting one's in-house software to yet another platform, when multi-processor AMD-64 chips running GNU/Linux are a dime a dozen?
RTFA. They aren't porting anything new since these are production machines, not render nodes. Maya, photoshop, shake, pixlet, backed by a top-notch interface and bsd, mmm... hey, you're not an artist, are you?
Anyway, for the ROI alone, this is good for shareholders, especially if creativity flows better.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Um... I assume that you are referring to the myth that Macs are more expensive. I would point you in the direction of reality on two counts:
1. Take a look at price/performance on the dual G5's. Many other people have, and they have been pretty unanimous that the Apple's win. See University of Virginia. The client computers are also competing against mainly SGI boxes... You will have a better time in your comparison of the linux render farm, but then you start to have to look at boxes competing against the XServe, and you will find them also very price competitive against the other server farm boxes they are competing against.
2. In terms of the price of production the hardware is one of the smaller costs. The big price is the people, this is also the place where the difference between a failure and a success will happen. If someone blames hardware for a bad pixar movie, they are simply stupid.
Any lawyer who cannot convince a jury of both of these points is incompetent.
Not knowing the details of what they're running, I'm guessing when I say the answer is AltiVec. The cheapest way to run Apache or Samba isn't necessarily the cheapest way to do heavy computation.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
SGI Octane + Irix + Maya +
Windows Box + Windows 2000 + Photoshop =
one kickass really expensive production environment.
Compared to what they used before, the G5's dirt cheap.
D
For many years, Apple's core business at the high end has been driven by just this decision: give the artists the best machines on the desktop that they can handle. The annual upgrade cycle for design and graphics industry makes sense, since any second wasted is expensive, and faster machines mean better ROI. Upgrading is ultimately cheaper.
Damn those pesky terrorists
If Steve had ordered Pixar to switch to mac, they would have done it at 10.0. Apple earned that customer.
You don't seem to understand the modern rendering workload. Its all I/O. A typical frame of geometry (>10GB) won't even fit into most memories, much less the textures which are often orders of magnitude larger. This is not your typical game or raytracer which loads everything in a couple seconds at the beginning and spends half an hour crunching numbers. Tremendous effort is spent paging stuff in and out and keeping memory from overflowing. Also keep in mind that it needs to probably be sucked over the network in the first place.
Having the additional address space of the 64-bit system will help a lot, as will the high throughput of the G5.
The Opteron may make sense here as well, but the software isn't mature enough yet for them to be able to run all the systems on it. Windows doesn't support the 64-bit yet, of course, and Linux stuff varies. For example, they presumably will want good 3D acceleration for the modeling if they really want to be able to use a certain system uniformly in their operation, and the performance of Linux 64-bit 3D drivers isn't up to the traditional x86 yet (and often won't even work if you have >4GB RAM).
Consider the XserveG5 -- uses less power than a similar Intel box and is cooler-running. What Pixar will save over the long run in electricity bills alone is probably worth the upgrade.
Doesn't make a difference if you're running 1 or 5 machines in your house, but it does make a signifigant difference if you're running 500 or machines.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Quite lossy? Are you setting the quality slider all the way to Best? Yes, Pixlet is lossy, but it's also a keyframe-less CODEC that brings data rates well over 3MB/second at DV resolution. That's almost as high as native DV and right around the same data rate as MJPEG. Yes, it's not uncompressed video, but that's not what Pixlet was designed for.
I don't know what % Jobs personally owns, but insiders own 57% of the company. Jobs stands to gain a lot more money by doing something to help Pixar than by doing something to help Apple that hurts Pixar.
Pixar will switch to whatever is currently going to suit their needs the best... in their business, they aren't going to sit around and use "legacy" stuff just because of previous investment.. you will see them re-tool much more often than a traditional business.
Steve probably didn't force it down their throats but he probably made a suggestion or two in the positive direction of Apple.
Another scenario is that Steve made it a challenge for Apple to get into Pixar. "Apple team, Pixar has requirements x, y, and z to switch to Macs. Go get 'em." It raises the bar for Apple and gives them a credible shot at other studios (except DreamWorks, which seems to view Apple as the enemy).
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Personally, I cheer any victory for Apple, the company (among many) that got shortchanged thanks to the dominance and abuse of the Microsoft monopoly that spread across all the IBM clones in the early 90s.
Pixar switching to Macs? Apple commercials before movies showing everyone a *real* operating system as opposed to their XP boxes at home? Hell, yeah.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Also for math (especially floating point) calculations, the G5 (PPC970) is much superior to the Intel IA-32 (not really a big thing if all you do is run Word, of course).
According to a talk by "Dr. BigMac" (from VA Tech) the only other high-volume CPU approaching it was the Intel Itanium, and here (quite an irony) Intel was under-clocked! (The G5, last year, was shipping at 2Gh, the Itanium less than that).
As for price, you can't compare a Dual G5 with a $200 walmart pc; but check the prices of any dual Dell Xeon system.
Um... I assume that you are referring to the myth that Macs are more expensive.
Anybody who wants to quote the "Macs are more expensive" line of FUD has never taken a look at the price of Sun or especially SGI hardware.
Hell, SGI doesn't list the prices of things on their page, they tell you to call and ask. That's the computer equvalent of "market price."
OS X:*nix for the real world.
If SCO pulled a magic rabbit out of there but and somehow proved they had IP rights to all of Linux and killed it off would the world grind to a stop? Would Slashdot go with it? Would people who participate in Slashdot die from grief? I don't think so. To imagine that Linux will be around forever and that encouraging that at ALL costs is foolish. I work in the real world where companies have to make money and protect their IP. To me GPL goes against this. If given a choice of a GPL license or a BSD license I opt for BSD every time.
People who take the holeyer than though view of Open Source are definitely walking the high road. It's a narrow-mindedness that I can't believe I'm hearing when coming from someone that I would normally consider to be highly intelligent. To me an example of the true spirit of Open Source is Apple. They took BSD and created Darwin and then release regularly the modifications to that operating system. That is truly honorable considering that with the freedom of BSD they do not HAVE to do so.
Plus, I don't think Steve Jobs would care if his xservers were running Linux or better yet BSD (pref Darwin) without OSX. Apple makes their money selling hardware. I really don't consider Microsoft to be a competitor of Apple. I think the real competitors are Dell, HP, etc..
Anyways, please step down from your Open Source soapbox and take a breath of air with the rest of us down here in the real world.
I realize that this comment might catch me some heat but Jesus I can't listen to this self centered propaganda any more.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
all the BSD developers who freely allowed us to steal^H^H^H^H^Huse your code
If I give you a beer, you didn't steal it from me.
You know, it's rather bizarre... the Linux/GPL fanatics will scream endlessly in the war against SCO about how licensing lets the copyright-holder do whatever they please with their code, and if the copyright-holder wishes to give it out for free with a license like the GPL which says it has to always remain open-source then that's their god-given right by law. Isn't that the counter to SCO's claim that the GPL is illegal?
So listen: you can't have it both ways. If licensing lets the copyright-holder come up with whatever terms s/he wishes, then that includes the BSD license which the copyright-holder VOLUNTARILY used. The people who wrote FreeBSD gave it to the community under the terms of the BSD licenses so that things like what Apple did could SPECIFICALLY happen. In essence, FreeBSD freely gave itself to Apple.
How is that stealing? FreeBSD said "Feel free to use our code to make money however you want". Apple did just that. Give it a rest.
I imagine that on a large enough scale operation, the cost to upgrade anually is decently offset by the power savings from not running the machines as long for the same output. I'm sure the remaining cost is easily made up for in the value of earlier release. Or along the route of higher quality frames, the same amount of power cost plus more in depth graphics is valuable to be seen as the pioneers in the field, plus having more visually appealing movies.
It is probable also very much what you're saying that hardware is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount they're making.
If not now, when?
What's the advantage to Pixar??? WTF!
The teams at Pixar are at the pinnacle of their industry. They do not take software and hardware choice lightly. They have not and would not till this day switch to using Apple solutions unless they proved superior. They have no use for hardware and software politics.
The evolution has been going on for some time at Apple.
Jobs has remade Apple software and hardware Pro Lines specifically for Hollywood, the CGI industries and this.
XServe, Xserve Raids, OpenGL direct rendering, xCode Tools for Rapid Development and distributive computing, XServe licensing and OS X licensing all are extremely cost effective. linux and Unix software has been ported OS X. G5 optimized Render-man, Shake, and the necessary tools are there.
This is the future and Apple is very much a part of it, deservedly so. A lot of extremely talented people have been working their asses of pursuing this dream for years and years now. This is just the first picking of an abundant and fruitful harvest for these folks.
More power to them!!!!!
.
Others have already addressed the point that for this application Macs are neither slower nor more expensive.
I'd point out that there are a couple of very good strategic reasons to go with Apple. First off they are in a niche that Apple is intent on dominating and is on the way to succeeding in this desire. Apple produces (or has bought) a lot of technology that is important to the broad category of film/video production that Pixar is part of. Beyond just Apple the other software vendors in this niche support the platform, a few don't support the *other* platforms.
Secondly, of course, is that Steve Jobs - the CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar is also the CEO of Apple. For obvious reasons Pixar is in a good position to get great service and consideration from this particular vendor. The "CEO mandate" dynamic you worry about on behalf of Pixar's shareholders (who are for the most part Mr. Jobs himself) works both ways. Apple which is already focussed on dominating the film/video market can act almost as a HUGE auxiliary R&D department for Pixar. They've already developed a new codec at Pixar's specific request. Apple has a huge amount of relevant technology it has already developed and/or bought. One might also notice that the XServe from the very beginning was configured as much for the video production market as it was for the server market - how many other servers have a FireWire port on the *front*?
but costly to Pixar's shareholders. One wonders what sorts of fudiciary issues such a maneuver might raise.
Since Jobs is himself the majority shareholder at Pixar with 55.4% of the shares not many. I would worry a great deal more about Jobs abusing his position at Apple to benefit Pixar's shareholders (i.e. himself) than vice versa.
1. Depends what you mean by make. Apple design their own hardware, their mother boards are all in-house designs that use a fair few custom chips that they also created. They outsource the manufacturing though like almost all the PC makers. Very few PC makers do any hardware design at all and that includes case design.
:P
2. Mac OS X 10.3 is not entirely 64bit. It does support 64 bit addressing so it can access more than 4GB of RAM. It also has 64bit optmisted math libraries. Since 32 bit code runs on the G5 with no performance penalty this will do for a while. People with G5 machines will get the main benefits of the 64bit-ness and the programs will still run on older 32bit systems.
3. 64bit Windows is still in beta. Linux is available on Apple hardware too.
4. I suppect not. It's more likely that Pixar paid the going rate for those machines. Apple has spent the past few years persuing the movie content creation market. The advantage Pixar had was an existing link with Apple to communicate their needs. Apple choose to fulfill those and so obviously they become the preferred platform.
Pixar will use the best tools for the job available at the time. Remember Steve Jobs take stage at an Intel conference when Pixar bought a shed load of Xeons for their render farm in 2003?
5. Don't go out and spec "okay" systems and then compare price. Spec comparable systems and compare price. That means keeping the differences between the two systems to a minimum.
Hell my old iMac was much cheaper than that Dual processor Xeon, I used that iMac for years and it was an okay system...
Fact is that the fastest available PC is slower in many respects than the fastest Mac available and the PC costs more. Blame the PC chip manufacturers for putting such a high premium on their newest chips for the price difference.
If you are willing to sacrifice a few MHz on your box the dual proc PC price will drop below that of the Mac. But it will also be slower still.
And remember if you are inclined to run a non-free OS on the PC especially as a server then the Mac costs much less.
Don't blame me - this