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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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!!!!!
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