AMD has struggled over the past year with production and marketing snafus, and some worried that the well-regarded ATI FireGL series cards would be in trouble. After all, AMD, which spent $5.4 billion to buy graphics card maker ATI last year, had long-time ATI CEO Dave Orton leave the combined company this past month. (While some speculated that there were problems over the buyout, Orton has only said that he was tired of the long-distance commute from his Ontario home.)
No need to worry, it seems. At the show, AMD announced five new ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerators, ranging from the $299 ATI FireGL V3600 to the first card to support 2GB of RAM, the top-of-the-line $2799 ATI FireGL V8650.
A new unified shader architecture optimizes performance, keeping the board‘s various processor units (vertex, pixel, and geometry) full to the brim and working flat out. Combined with DirectX 10- and OpenGL 2.1, demos of the cards show that users of apps like Autodesk Maya and Softimage XSI can expect significant speed boosts. (Watch for upcoming release of OpenGL 3 for added processing potency.)
Unique aspects of the FireGL series include the only support for dual monitor, 10-bit video, says product manager Rob Jamison. Jamison also made mention that the ATI division isn’t AMD-centric, but will be fully supporting Intel-based workstations, along with a new Linux initiative.
Why does a visual effects company sell plug ins? Frantic Films made their reputation with the huge bullet-time shot on Swordfish and their Emmy-nominated work on Storm of the Century. More recently: the VES-nominated Superman Returns and Poseidon, and currently Eric Brevig‘s Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.
From the start, says Bond, Frantic was conceived as a collaborative company both internally among their three offices and in their relationships with industry peers. To that end, they wanted to share the fruits of their painstaking R&D.
“A lot of companies keep the stuff proprietary. But for us, there‘s nothing to gain from being closed.” he says. But as it turned out, sharing wasn‘t so easy. At first, Frantic simply gave code from their products away for free. But the purpose-built code didn‘t translate one-to-one into new situations. more…
IBM originally envisioned the new HC-10 Workstation Blade as a workstation replacement, say IBM’s Dave Laux and George Dolbier. It‘s a high density server with embedded GPU acceleration. “We found it also worked incredibly well as a headless render node,” Laux says a little wryly. Isn’t interesting when hardware reveals its own mission?
First let’s just say that a workstation blade is an interesting idea for those who can afford the infrastructure. It means that every seat in the house can share a common pool of workstations easily (in theory).
But think about the GPU accelerated renderfarm, Laux says. while things like 2D rendering, lighting, shading texturing move to the GPU (asssuminig you have Gelato, similar, or proprietary code to split the instructions), your same 1/2 RU hardware does more work faster for the same electric bill, heat load, liscensing costs, etc.
Time for a clarification. The name “workstation blade” can be confusing. It’s clear when you’re thinking about using them as workstations. But if you move to the renderfarm idea, understand that these blades are not workstations working as servers (as is sometimes the case in renderfarms). they are real servers with the floating point peformance, durability, networking, power supply, redundancy, and security advantages of servers as well as the server architecture that connects the CPU to the memory, network, disc drive.
Not for the faint of budget, but for the few–worth a look. Don’t try to penetrate the IBM maze. Just email Laux at dlaux@us.ibm.com.
Grimage
Put any object into the interaction space and it is intantaneously modeled in 3D and injected into a virtual world.
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With due credit to the product engineers both at the chip and workstation level, and to the demands of ISVs, as I look around Siggraph I also give credit for all this hardware innovation to the users. It was user standards and pushback that truly drove the remarkable dialog in software lo these many years; same is true now with hardware. You get what you settle for, and DCC has never been a place for people who settle for anything. No chance of that abating and here’s the proof: check out The Wheels on the Bus exhibit on the main floor and see what kindergartners are up to.
Lots of video game-playing action at the Digital Media Art College Booth (551), where players battled with plastic guitars to the Toadies Possum King in a game called Guitar Hero. The guitars, outfitted with plastic colored buttons, were used to knock out riffs which displayed in sequence on the screen. “You Rock!” greeted the triumphant winner.
Some sightings:
60 Dell Precision dual core Intel-Xeon based systems in the Guerilla Studio.
At the Autodesk users’ group Monday night (dual quad cores). At the Softimage users’ group Tuesday night (same). At the Autodesk gathering–which was big, I’m going to say easily over 1000, but I’m not good at counting heads. Anyway big enough that when everyone started to murmur about the real time performance they were seeing on Maya and Max, the demo artist finally stopped and said “yes, these are really fast machines.”
Later, chatting with Patrick Hannan, Dell worldwide marketing exec for the Precision division, he took the chance to make his pitch for what he says will be increasingly symbiotic and integrated relationships between hardware and software. He predicts that increasingly artists will not only make the traditional app-driven choices about their tools, but will increasingly look at–and demand–performance and feature benefits from a combination of app and workstation.
It’s been a busy year in workstations, and with the 45 nano chips coming, with Intel’s push on the Centrino implementation for mobile, and with competition among PC vendors, we can hope to see more murmuring from all the user groups.
First, in case you don’t know what Fjorg! is here’s the blurb: The world‘s first international FJORG! competition is an “iron animator” event at SIGGRAPH 2007 in which 16 competing teams from around the world will have 32 hours to create the world‘s best character-driven animation in front of a live, “Gladiator-style” audience and judging panel.
And the winners are: First place, Team Mocap from Bowling Green State University for their animation “Switch.” The team consists of Jim Levasseur, Tomas Jech, and W. Jacob Gardner. Congrats to the team and you can see their winning entry later today at www.workstations.tv.
So why is the title of this post about the Art Institutes?
Because second and third place both went to AI teams. Picture This, a team from Miami International University of Art and Design came in second place and Impulse, from Illinois Institute of Art-Schaumburg, won third place. Their winning entries will also be avaialable to see later on today. I’ll also get back to you with the winning students’ names (my Exchange Server is down with that info stuck inside!). more…
Last night may have marked the premiere party for Siggraph ‘07. Softimage, Vicon, and Pendulum–along with mova–held their celebration for the Siggraph community at the San Diego House of Blues.
Titled Visual Fxtasy, the event was the place to be, as marked by the nearly 1,000 attendees who lined up all the way down 6th street and even around the corner along a full block of G St. Luckily, Softimage hooked us up with VIP list treatment so we could bypass the wait, but bless those who did stand in the more-than-an-hour-long line, because they helped amplify the classic House of Blues ambience.
DJs, Go Go boots, mohawks, and paled paisely vintage suits displayed the spirit of the animators, visual effects artists, students, studio employees, exhibitors, etc. that put on display the vibrance that the Siggraph show brings with it’s attendees–and proved the perfect way for everyone to unwind after two solid days of the show.
Thanks again to Softimage, Vicon, and Pendulum for the good times and we look forward to an encore next year.
Continuing on from my earlier posting on mobile workstations, ran into David Critchley and Jon Heim of Lenovo–the market leader in China for workstatsions. Lenovo’s purchase of the IBM ThinkPad division continues to bear modest fruit for the DCC space with a new addition to the T-line of mobile workstations.
Critchley brought two machines to the show, a laptop running Novell’s Linux SLED 10 and the new T61p. The SLED laptop is a business laptop but the SLED component is nonetheless fun to see, especially on the heels of the Monday’s Linux World announcement of the Novell/Lenovo partnership to pre-load Lenovo’s T series enterprise notebooks with SLED.
Apart from this Linux-savvy demonstration, Critchley was also showing a Centrino Duo/Vista-based ThinkPad designed to compete for the entry-level mobile workstation market. Dedicated 256 meg of video memory, Nvidia 570 with Turbo Cache (so the ability to take video memory from main memory). IO is best docked–that’s how you get the DVI features. Also VGA out. Of note: no HDMI port; Critchley says the company is taking the Display Port/HDMI debate seriously before making a decision. more…
