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. 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). more

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.

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.” more

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. more

Mo cap is entering a golden age–or maybe a green one, as both new and established companies alike are churning out product to get or gain market share. As I mentioned in two earlier postings, established companies like Vicon as well as newcomers like Reallusion are just two companies at the show with cool gear in the booth or promised ‘real soon‘.

In part, it‘s because of the growing popularity of a more sophisticated generation of mo cap-based projects like Pirates of the Caribbean (just saw behind the scenes previews of Zemeckis‘ Beowolf at the Electronic Theater–looks great!).

The elements used in mo cap technology are being spun off for other uses too. Long-time motion tracking manufacturer InterSense (www.intersense.com) collaborated with 3D virtual studio developer Cinital (www.cinital.com) to create the latest in previsualization stages for Stargate Digital, which recently opened a virtual studio in Van Nuys, California. more

A word from our sponsor: Dan Snyder at the Penton booth:

Wow, what a phenomenal showing for our just one-year-old baby Core 2 Duo and Core Xeons here at Siggraph. HP, Boxx, Dell, Alienware and tons of others are showing these systems really being pushed to their limits. I am still reeling from French food envy after seeing Ratatouille (every frame of that was touched by an Intel CPU, thanks to a 30% speedup of Renderman on the new architecture!)… Softimage’s gig last night with the behind the scenes of “300″ would boggle even the geekiest computer guy’s mind. Great to see the software and hardware coming together here, we’re glad to be a little bit of the glue that makes this magic happen. Kudos to the artists–where it all starts!

–Dan Snyder, Intel 3D and Audio/Video Group

SupaCam, which is backed in part by Panasonic, is selling their popular DVi handheld, tapeless, digital movie recorder for only $328 over at their booth (booth #853)-about $500 less than you would pay at B&H or other resellers. Up for grabs are black, white, and silver models.

The camera, about the size of your hand, does 24 bit color at 30 fps at 720 x 480, both NTSC and PAL, in MPG 4 or dvx formats. It can also serve as a webcam, with a 25 ft. remote and 180 degree motion sensor triggered when activity occurs within it’s optic range–and can stream online in HD quality. For digital photographers, 12 megapixels.

Expect mobile workstations (and the IO to go with them) to become an increased area of focus in the coming year. For example, after spending much of this year deploying and supporting a range of new multi-core chips for powerful new generation workstations, Intel says they will next increase the spotlight on mobile.

You just need to look around Siggraph to see the power of fixed workstations–the Autodesk and Softimage user groups literally gasped at the level of realtime and near realtime rendering they were seeing on stage. Guerilla Studios provides a hands-on chance to see for yourself. And the 32-hour animation contest at the Fjorg! would have been pretty impractical even last year. So we’ll see how much power ends up hitting the mobile workforce in the coming year. more

Better hardware and software are making it easier to do high-end work where it hasn‘t gone before. In July ESPN debuted The Bronx is Burning, an eight-part baseball - themed miniseries for ESPN Original Entertainment that used a compact, truck-friendly HD editing setup that makes for slick location production.

The production, shot on location throughout Connecticut (ESPN‘s home turf), employed Thomson‘s VIPER FilmStream camera system and a full 4:4:4 HD post workflow designed by Creative Bridge and Technicolor. A mobile truck dubbed Technicolor Creative Bridge‘s Mobile Digital Lab and Theatre (MDLT) included Globalstor‘s ExtremeStor DI workstation, a PNY provided Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI card, and Assimilate‘s SCRATCH.

The MDLT truck–first introduced at NAB 2006–enabled 4:4:4 data capture from the Viper‘s storage, full 1920 X 1080 projection, real-time color correction, real-time HD-SDI playback, HD and SD down conversion, and direct to disk file transfers. more