AMD and Lucasfilm

[Stretchman]

Hello there,

I was noticing a few advertisements around the web, offering the "latest AMD technology used by George Lucas to make Star Wars: Episode III" and became curious about the connection.

Here is a link to an interesting article talking more about the AMD based systems used by Lucasfilm to make Ep. III, for anyone who is interested.

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2005/05/24/amd_lucas_starwars/1.html

 

[Bona Fide]

Opterons > Xeons

George Lucas just made it official.

 

[Farmer]

Well, I'm sure lots of businesses/IT guys would switch over to AMD stuff it weren't for the fact that all the pass-through companies (Dell, HP-Compaq, IBM) all keep liking Intel.

Sure we like AMD, but when you're talking about 10 servers and 100+ workstations, you don't want to build each one ourselves and not have a reputable company (Dell, HP, IBM) to back them up.

But of course, they all run AMD at home.

 

[w00t]

Originally posted by: Bona Fide
Opterons > Xeons

George Lucas just made it official.

lol, true.

 

[Stretchman]

I was especially interested in how AMD designed their Hypertransport technology to be so much more efficient @ data transfer than the Xeon architecture, allowing Lucasfilm's digital animators to render complex scenes on the fly.

Very cool stuff

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I honestly don't know how it is now, but the main reason I chose to go dual Xeon instead of Opteron, was that the AMD mobos & chipsets were just complete crap. They didn't have anything with as many features and as solid as what Intel had... But like I said, I have no idea how it is now. That was nearly about 1 - 2 years ago.
Tas.

 

[bulbasuar]

Are you sure that isnt a Coperate sponsered commercial... Its sounds like cheesy...

 

[Le Québécois]

Wasn't Dell supposed to use Opteron on their server machine?

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Farmer
Well, I'm sure lots of businesses/IT guys would switch over to AMD stuff it weren't for the fact that all the pass-through companies (Dell, HP-Compaq, IBM) all keep liking Intel.

Sure we like AMD, but when you're talking about 10 servers and 100+ workstations, you don't want to build each one ourselves and not have a reputable company (Dell, HP, IBM) to back them up.

But of course, they all run AMD at home.

Actually HP is one of the strongest Opteron backers, having a blade, both a 2-way and 4-way server, and a HPC server, as well as workstations.
Sun is another major backer with a pretty similar lineup, and supposedly bigger systems(8 sockets or more) on the way.

 

[Farmer]

Sunner:

Good of you to point that out. We have a couple of Xeon servers here (HP Compaq) and have heard of the AMD HPs. We just aren't in any condition to do any sort of major upgrade.

First comes fiber.

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: tasburrfoot78362
I honestly don't know how it is now, but the main reason I chose to go dual Xeon instead of Opteron, was that the AMD mobos & chipsets were just complete crap. They didn't have anything with as many features and as solid as what Intel had... But like I said, I have no idea how it is now. That was nearly about 1 - 2 years ago.
Tas.

You should check out some of the new stuff. The nForce 4 Professional chipset is a seriously nice workstation board for Opterons. The Tyan Thunder K8WE is solid as a rock and is packed with just about every feature you could want for a workstation. You've got onboard SCSI, Firewire, two full speed x16 graphics slots, two 100MHz PCI-X slots, one 133MHz PCI-X and eight DIMM slots.

Here's a Wired article where they talk about War of the Worlds and how their new Opterons allowed ILM to do the effects in record time. Here's the excerpt that deals with how much the Opterons have sped up ILMs work:

Spielberg became a convert when he met pre-viz specialist Dan Gregoire at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch in 2003. Gregoire was midway through Revenge of the Sith when he and his team got PCs equipped with AMD's new 64-bit Opteron microprocessor. Suddenly they were able to pre-viz a sequence of shots in an hour instead of several days. Lucas ended up looking over Gregoire's shoulder and making changes on the spot, almost as if he were directing actors on a set. So when Spielberg signed on to make War of the Worlds, one of his first calls went to Gregoire.

For War of the Worlds, Gregoire took real-time pre-viz on the road. "This backpack is my office," he says, sitting in a tent near Spielberg's and holding up a black nylon bag stuffed with gear: a Titanium PowerBook G4, a bright red Opteron-equipped Acer Ferrari laptop, 60- and 250-gigabyte FireWire drives, and a Sony PD100 digital camcorder. Last August, when they were scouting locations on the East Coast, Gregoire would climb into a chopper to photograph potential sites from the air and then take measurements on the ground. Back at Spielberg's house in the Hamptons, he'd reconstruct these environments on his laptop. In September, he moved into an office near Spielberg's at Universal Studios and, with the director at his side, mapped out key sequences. At that point, Spielberg himself took over.

"Once all the info goes into the hard drive, I'm able to take a mouse and fly the set," Spielberg says. "I can do a 3-D cyberspace location hunt and nail my angles. If I want to move the camera 50 feet into the building, all of a sudden we're doing that. I would have pre-vizzed this picture even if it had been a 2006 release - but I would not have made this release date had I not pre-vizzed the picture."

I bet they probably have upgraded all of the equipment to dual core by now, so they are probably in heaven.

 

[ArneBjarne]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: Farmer
Well, I'm sure lots of businesses/IT guys would switch over to AMD stuff it weren't for the fact that all the pass-through companies (Dell, HP-Compaq, IBM) all keep liking Intel.

Sure we like AMD, but when you're talking about 10 servers and 100+ workstations, you don't want to build each one ourselves and not have a reputable company (Dell, HP, IBM) to back them up.

But of course, they all run AMD at home.

Actually HP is one of the strongest Opteron backers, having a blade, both a 2-way and 4-way server, and a HPC server, as well as workstations.
Sun is another major backer with a pretty similar lineup, and supposedly bigger systems(8 sockets or more) on the way.

IBM have Opteron server, blade and workstation as well, so the initial post is actually wrong except for Dell.