Siggraph

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.