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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've been telling people for some time now to watch Pixar closely now that the G5 and OS X has matured. It was only a matter of time before they finally switched the SGI and Linux stations over. The rendar farm however still uses a mixture of SUNs and SGI but I've no doubt that G5 Xserves would probably fit in quite nicely... now if they can only start shipping the damn things.
apple can tout this bigtime with real effective results (pixar movie$)
it's not just a niche - pair this with WETA and you've got real ammo.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Peebles went on to say that this switch was "a move that no doubt made common CEO Steve Jobs very happy."
...a move that just has to be a wee bit influenced by the FUD of SCO's IP claims on Linux too.
With Steve Jobs head honcho at both companies, you would have thought this would have happened a long time ago. Of course, the G5's entering the picture helps quite a bit I'm sure.
Will the rendering farm also be switching to the G5 in the future, ala Virginia Tech?
Will we now see Photorealistic Renderman come out for OSX and the G5? Hopefully?
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I'm running Gentoo, so I don't care if I have to specially compile. I just want a machine that's going to actually USE the MHz it comes with. (Without resorting to massive cache.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
G5 + OS X + Maya + Photoshop + Pixlet = one kickass production environment.
Really though do they need to change the Linux farm? I'd be surprised if they did, there's no real need...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Does it really outperform a beowulf cluster of Athlon 64 FX-51 running linux?
I think it's fair to assume that Jobs gives a substantial discount on Apple stuff to Pixar, while AMD probably doesn't.
I also doubt that they would use Athlon 64 (FX) for this kind of work; Opterons, which can go up to 8-ways, would be the logical choice (but I'm no expert).
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I can see why they need PPC 970 processors, and buying them in bulk from Apple is probably just as cheap as buying them in bulk from IBM when looking at complete systems and volume discount with desktop stuff, but why do they need to run OS X on the hosts instead if dispensing with one hell of a lot of OS licenses and running Darwin, BSD or Linux?
Beep beep.
I'll not post any findings, nor will I give you any numbers of my OWN personal experience.
Google for the default install size of WindowsXP versus OS X.
THEN tell me which one's bloatware.
You got it right with Linux...but blew it otherwise.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
Maybe I'm blind, but I just don't see the benefit to Pixar here. Unless they got some sweetheart deal from Jobs, they now must buy all new hardware and pay for software updates. I noticed there was a comment about challenging Apple to come up with a way to view HD media in smaller file sizes, but that's just software compression, right? Except for the Cocoa interface, how hard would it be to have Pixlet running on their existing systems, especially since Pixar helped develop it in the first place? Please help me out here.
Making animated movies of the sort that Pixar produces would certainly be very hardware-intensive. I think it just makes sense.
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?
Even at cost, this deal will be expensive for Pixar in the medium term, and certainly in the long term. There is no technical, and even less, financial reason for this move. The move is strategic and PR related, and has more to do with Apple nipping its Linux competition in the bud as an initial move to freeze the platform out of the lucrative entertainment industry long term as anything else.
Long term, Linux is as much a threat to Apple as Microsoft is, arguably more so, since Microsoft is restrained by anti-trust legislation, while the numerous competing Linux providors, by definition, don't run afoul of such laws (and thus aren't so restricted). Indeed, software freedom represents a fundamental long-term threat to companies who make their money selling software rather than services, and Apple probably does not want to be relegated to the role of hardware vendor only, forced to compete with faster, cheaper offerings such as AMD.
It is interesting to see the CEO of Apple/Pixar mandate a move that is strategically important to Apple, but costly to Pixar's shareholders. One wonders what sorts of fudiciary issues such a maneuver might raise.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Who cares... disk is so cheap. Memory is so cheap. Processing power is way beyond what the average person needs.
I could agree with this statement. However, let's keep in mind that Pixar was in the middle of several productions, and everyone knows you don't rip your underpinnings out and replace them wholesale during the middle of a project. Additionally, they moved from SGI boxes to Linux boxes, and now to G5s. Each move about 18 months apart. This would be about the viable life time of high end graphics workstations. I recall as well that Panther made some serious improvements in various areas, and may have finally pushed the performance realm over the edge where the G5 was a better fit over generic Linux boxes.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
One thing that hasn't been clear in the news releases is that Pixlet is a lossy codec. At first I thought it was lossless but on testing it is lossy (quite lossy actually). It is useful for previewing high-res animations, but not for rendering final elements.
I'm not really sure what the point of Pixlet is, since JPEG is "good enough" for most previewing needs. Perhaps somebody is using it for >8 bits per component?
It's probably cost-effective for such huge consumers of computer power to swap out their equipment on roughly an annual basis. The difference between, say, a dual 2ghz and a dual 3ghz system would be huge for them.
Now that I'm doing more video production I'll probably be doing that too, and using my current dual G5 as a render farm for my new main machine. Based on the results I'm getting and the speeds I get, it would be well worth the money to do that.
Finally, I don't think Pixar's stockholders are in much of a mood to be cheap. Say it costs US$1 million a year to replace their equipment. Finding Nemo is a well over billion-dollar property. Do stockholders care about spending $1 million to make sure the (most likely pretty high paid) people over there get the best equipment?
Somehow I doubt it.
D
I think the biggest difference to me (being an MacOSX Fan) is that with G5's the most you can do currently is a DUAL configuration. I would REALLY like to see apple step up and offer larger options. 4 way or 8 way configurations should be an option. There is no comparison of an 8way ANYTHING to a Dual G5.
Are people that assume all Mac users are these mindless people that need one button mice.
I've been doing work on UNIX computers and other platforms for years and years. I bought a Mac because it has a great front end to make simple things simple, and the UNIX backend stuff to make hard things possible. I still use GnuEmacs and it works just fine on OS X.
Also, the licence you apparently are seeking is GPL - the whole POINT of the BSD licence is that companies can make use of the code in the way they are doing. The developers working on BSD chose to work on BSD over Linux or some other GPL system knowing exactly this. As a coder I would think you would be proud to have something you wrote in such widespread use, instead of being a greedy whiner who is upset someone else is making money by using your code. Write your own amazing thing to make money from the code you wrote. Heck, by Apple stock when they adopt your code if you believe in it strongly!! That would have turned out really well for anyone who bought Apple stock around the time when they released OS X at large. They took the risks and also reaped the rewards, which anyone could have shared in.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If there is anything you learn about SJ quickly, it is that he is the absolute definition of "hands-on".
If this wasn't run past Steve and fully approved by him at a minimum, I would be surprised. That he was likely asking hard questions and pushing his team to do it, wouldn't surprise me at all.
One of Apple's major customer segments is video prodution for television and movies. Apple for years has had an extremely strong niche in the Entertainment industry (why do you think you see Macs in almost every TV show and movie as the "computer of choice"?). Over the last 18 months they have spent a lot acquiring products to fill out their digital video, video effects, and audio editing and production product line. What we have hear is showing, by eating their own dog food, that they are serious and that you can do it all on the Mac.
Steve is the master salesman and technical visionary. His finger-prints are all over this move!
How do I know that? I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you, ie. I've seen the servers myself :)
Posted anonymously to protect the innocent.
Inside Apple, there is a significant number of people who think that Linux is as big a threat as Microsoft. Many many people here subscribe to the notion that the GPL is anti-business and that if Linux becomes really successful, Apple will be forced to open source everything and go out of business. When that news item came out talking about Linux desktop marketshare passing Apple, there was a huge flurry of anti-Linux postings in the internal forums, and a photoshopped image of Richard Stallman dressed up as a sickle-carrying goat eating a large american-flag draped Apple logo made its way around in our internal iChat.
Most big VFX movies have credits at the very end to key software used like Alias' Maya, Softimage, PRMan, Shake and the like. In the good old days even SGI was also listed on some. It's not that uncommon.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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?
It's not slower or more expensive, and the cost of porting in-house software would be nearly zilch considering OS X is a POSIX-based BSD-like system.
What's the problem here? It's a UNIX-like system with the most intuitive and productive interface there is. Of course Pixar would go for it.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Actually Pixar is the exception to the rule. Most big companies (ILM, Weta, DD, Imageworks, R+H, Tippett, etc.) are a combination of Linux, SGI and PCs. Small studios are mainly PC/Win based. A few other exceptions, I think Tweak Films is also OS X, and ESC mainly using Win2000 in the Matrix sequels. Other companies have been pushing multimedia Linux, from ILM's OpenEXR, Rhythm and Hues contributions to CinePaint, DD's Nuke, even Pixar with PRMan and the tools. Most big CG software vendors haqve Linux versions (Maya, Softimage, Houdini, mental ray, PRMan, etc.).
I've always wondered....what types of people work at Pixar? I mean in "computer" terms like skillsets, knowledge, degrees, etc. I've never seen any discussions or articles that talk about this.
Who actually works with and on these machines? - and what do they do with them?
They don't make that much money on software. I don't have the reference handy, but because of Microsoft Office, to this day Microsoft makes more money per Mac sold than Apple does because the overhead of the hardware is much greater. But Microsoft Office helps them sell their machines so they're happy---they're not really competing with them, anyway. And if you write freeware that will help them sell their machines, they'll be happy with that, too. They are a hardware company, and they probably see the extra software you buy from them more as form of support rather than as a product like Microsoft or SCO does. Hardware companies do sell support; they even sell some software support.
It just doesn't sound to me like Linux has Steve Jobs shaking in his boots. He caters mostly to a niche market of people who want a box they can just turn on and use. This is something Linux could never be unless it was running a proprietary desktop. A usable GUI is something that needs research and that means a lot of money for that research. Programmers are technical people and very few know well how to design for the rest of the world. And the people at Apple are happy if people just buy their computers---they'll even license resellers who sell it with Linux on it.
And free software is not as big of a threat to Apple. As long as there is proprietary hardware to which to interface, there will always be proprietary software. Because Apple is mainly a hardware seller, they will always have control over their software that GPLed software can never have.
Furthermore, no matter how you may want to see it, Steve Jobs has and still puts a good deal of time and money into the Objective-C interface for gcc rather than having developed his own propietary compiler. You'll probably put your own spin on why he had to do that, but all spin aside, that's probably a hell of a lot more than you ever donated or ever will, for that matter.
Yeah, I'll bet the archair CEO's are anxious to go after Steve for doing such a thing. I mean, it might be different if Pixar's last quarterly financial results were record-setting, or if they made over 50% profit.
Oh wait, Pixar did all those things.
Never mind. Maybe he's not such a bad leader after all.
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SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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.
I'd like to see how Macs running OS8 would've handled the load.
NT was lightyears ahead of MacOS, it's just the propaganda and sales pitches of Apple worshippers that screamed otherwise.... BOTH Macs and Windows sucked hard back then (one of those platforms still kinda sucks now -- let's call it "the more popular one"). But you can't dis NT when Macs were worse, and convince me you're being fair and honest.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
Does windows come with visual studio, dns server, proxy, etc?
OSX comes with gcc, java, perl, python, even with X11 and Xcode
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Thank Apple for FreeBSD
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
all the BSD developers who freely allowed us to steal^H^H^H^H^Huse your code so that we could make millions of dollars selling hardware that we couldn't even make our selves without IBM's help.
OS X uses the XNU kernel, which is based mostly on Mach--not BSD as is commonly thought around these parts. The BSD subsystem is one of many in the kernel. Click here.
"Sufferin' succotash."
> Ummm...My XP box runs great, cost 980$ for me to build and
> would compete with your dual G5.
And just what colour _IS_ the sky in that fantasy world you call home? You 980$ PC can't come anywhere near compteting with a dual G5. You want to compete with a dual G5 you go check out the prices for a dual Xeon and you'll STILL be slower, as Vtech discovered.
Remember, Vtech chose the G5 not because they were Apple fans, but because it was by far the best bang for the buck. No intel/AMB consumer chip cluster could touch it, and nothing could come anywhere near it at the price.
I'm curious where you folks are getting those ownership numbers .... For some reason, I can't see Steve listed in the insider list (Yahoo Finance) for either PIXR or AAPL
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Maybe Apple and Pixar have been working with the graphics card companies to develop OS X drivers for FireGL and Quadro. Maybe Radeons and GeForces are "good enough" now for professional workstations. Does anybody know?
I don't know how Apple works volume discounts, but I remember the people at Virginia Tech saying that they didn't get any discounts over the regular educational discounts when they bought 1,100 Power Mac G5s. I would be willing to bet that Pixar didn't get a deal any better than what any customer buying a similar number of computers would have gotten.
True enough... I was referring to the portion of the comment that claimed "Processing power is way beyond what the average person needs.". OS bloat (as in, size of installation) isn't a problem in that regard. OS bloat as in overhead is, though.
Cheers.
Anyone notice that this story's SID is 100,000? *
Wow. It's pretty amazing that we've managed to produce this many stories in such a short time. Kudos to the editing staff!
*It's only 27 if you don't count the dupes
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
BeOS is the closest I've seen to instantaneous reaction to user input. The 'bloat' difference between OS X and XP is that I can uninstall most anything on the mac, whereas Bill's gotta make it 'integrated'. :(
Actually, back in the day, they used to have an equation for how they would decide on what hardware to buy for their renderfarm. Power consumption factored heavily into it. Although this was back in the day when they were rendering on sun systems. (I can't even remember when Suns had decent floating point specs).