re: "was aware of Scooby-Doo and that such studios as Pixar have been won over. It that industry AMD is actually well known and respected. "
Hi All!
I have to chime on here because this is subject that is somewhat close to home for me since I work in the visual effects industry.
Two years ago I helped a company spec out a render farm for an upcoming project involving a CG dog with about 4 million digital hairs. The company had plans to use about a hundred 1Ghz pentium III's for the project, but I managed to talk them into the purchase one 1.4Ghz T-bird to run some comparison benchmarks. Right off the bat, there were a bunch of concerns about the compatibility with intel based workstations already in place. It seems a few years earlier a bunch of people got burned when they got slightly different results when they mixed frames rendered on SGI's and PCs. That's Apples to Oranges, but people were scared just the same.
In any case after exhaustive testing everything checked out, and the best part was that the AMD processor renderered frames in about 60% of the time it took for a Pentium III at about the same cost. That really got everyone very interested.
We all had concerns about heat and stability since these procs would be working 24/7 for the next year or two and we didn't know of any other company at that time that was using them. Pentium III was just the standard rendering platform throughout the industry. Our solution was to just slowly ramp up the farm over the spring as our production requirements increased.
That was a lot of fun. People used to come by to visit from various other effects houses and they'd ask what we were using. When I'd tell them a bunch of AMD T-birds they'd look at me like I'd sprouted a second head. We used to hear so much crap from people that should have known better. People would swear they had used AMD processors before and they didn't do X, Y, or Z. Things like the floating point unit produced rounding errors or the colors wouldn't match up with the intel machines. One of the stupidest things I heard was from I guy who swore the animation he rendered on an AMD processor didn't work until he moved it to an intel based machine. It actually became a nice litmus test to find out which tech guys didn't know what the hell they were talking about.
By the fall of 2001 I think people's opinions started changing. We started getting complements on our decision, and people would tell us they were planning on buying a bunch of Athlons when they did the next expansion of their render farm.
I don't know if we were the first to build an AMD based 100 proc render farm, but I like to think we were one of the first. In fact, if anyone knows better, I'd love to hear about it. I am pretty sure Rhythm and Hues got wind of what we did through the grape vine since we hired a bunch of people who had close ties with their company. I know they did "Cats and Dogs" with pentium III's because our company was considering renting the same racks they used to do our show. I actually didn't realize this until just now, but I find it very interesting to hear that they used Athlons for "Sum of All Fears" and "Scooby Doo". Oh well, who knows for sure, but its fun to think I played some little part with AMD's acceptance in the visual effects community.
Oh yeah, our farm ran rock solid for two years straight. Those Athlons were real work horses for us. By the end of production a lot of them even got converted into ad hoc servers or workstations for artists when we needed something in a pinch. I don't think we had a single one fail during the entire two years. That was pretty impressive since a couple of our dual proc pentium III's went in for service at least a couple of times and our SGI's were always squirrely. We did have a few DOA motherboards, and one or two chips got damaged during installation but nothing out of the ordinary. Yeah, we built every dang one from scratch. We used to clean out New Egg's inventory every time we expanded the farm. I think they implemented quotas because of people like us.
In any case, I had to share. That little render farm was my baby and I just had to brag about it a bit. Now I'm just snooping around looking for any information about Opteron. It seems that everyone I talk to can't wait for this processor to come out. I guess that means I wont be one of the first to build an Opteron farm, but its amazing to see the change in perspective over the last two years. People don't even bat an eye when you tell them you have an Athlon based farm. It's just become standard practice although I have to add that Pentium 4's are being used pretty heavily these days too.
Well, this got pretty long. I doubt there was any new information, but I hope you enjoyed the read. To sum it up: Yes, AMD is very much accepted within the motion picture effects community. Too bad not many other industries have figured it out. |
