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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Pixar Switching to Mac OS X 65

Posted by pudge from the ipixar dept.
DavidRavenMoon writes "MacCentral reports that Pixar technologist Dr. Michael Johnson says Linux, Sun and Windows-based systems are being replaced by Mac OS X. 'The studio's entire team uses Mac OS X not only for creative work, but for workflow and custom application development.'"
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Pixar Switching to Mac OS X More

Pixar Switching to Mac OS X

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  • Must be difficult for the employees... (Score:4, Funny)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @04:12PM (#3499000) Homepage Journal

    Keeping track of which is the desk-lamp [pixar.com] and wich one is the computer [apple.com] is going to get difficult.
  • well is it? If you owned a computer company, and you owned a company that uses a whole lot of computers, wouldn't you want your own company useing your own products?
  • Wow, Jobs must really be relieved. I mean, since he's returned to Apple he's been trying to sell the Mac as a tool for artists, while his own company that actually employs digital artists has been using the real tools!

    I can't say I blamed Pixar, though; the pre-X versions of the Mac OS were fine for schools and light home use, but the lack of decent memory and process management was a major drawback for feature film production.

    It's great to see Macs become competitive again. Let's hope that a) Pixar can maintain the calibar of their work, and b) a Linux-based competitor can give them a run for their money.

    ;)

    • "a Linux-based competitor can give them a run for their money. "

      oh, you filthy whore, you.

      Anyway, Macs have been churning out high volume work for years. They were the backbone of the digital press, and now they're becoming the backbone of digital film.

      Final Cut and Premiere ran fine on OS X Macs. Sure, they run better on OS X, but that doesn't mean OS X was as horrible as you make it out to be.

  • 180 Degree turn around? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by malducin ( 114457 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @04:50PM (#3499249) Homepage

    It wasn't long ago that Pixar actually started to make the switch to Linux, it was reported in several places. Has Steve Jobs given an edict? While it might be fine it sounds rather abrupt. I wonder if everyone is satisfied.

    Here is the quote from the CGW article from September 2001 (which requires free registration):

    A studio just beginning the Linux transition is Pixar Animation Studios. Vice president of research and development Darwyn Peachey says, "This is the platform that will replace SGI in the CG industry. There's been a lot of progress made since last year. Nobody is wondering 'if' anymore." SGI as a hardware platform is being displaced by high-performance PCs, but the company isn't going away. SGI is actively supporting Linux, both on its hardware and through the Linux port of Maya by subsidiary Alias|Wavefront. Because Linux runs on PC, SGI, and Sun machines, it enables studios to support just one OS.
    Like DreamWorks, Pixar faced a massive job in porting its existing code. Pixar finished the Linux port of all its internal software, about two million lines, in May. RenderMan command line tools have been available on Linux since 1999. RenderMan Artist Tools, for use with Linux Maya, are now in beta testing. "Porting went very fast, averaging 2000 lines of code per developer day," says Peachey. "The port to Linux is straightforward, where Windows is difficult." Pixar has more than 500 SGI desktops and uses Sun servers for its renderfarm. About 30 Linux machines are in use for software development, and 20 Linux machines are used in production. By fall, at least 100 Linux desktops are expected to be used in production. Pixar's next film, Finding Nemo (release date summer 2003), is to be produced primarily using Linux systems.

    Here is the link:

    Linux Invades Hollywood [pennnet.com]

    The most puzzling thing is if they plan to substitute the SUN renderfarm, as one of the things they like is that they can pack a lot of power in slim racks (14 CPUs on each last time I heard). Maybe they got more space at Emmeryville now ;-). As recent as last holiday season SUN touted its hardware shortly after the release of Monster's Inc.:

    SUN story on Monsters Inc. [sun.com]

    Tom Duff sometimes posts around here, maybe he can comment? It's rather interesting.

    • The most puzzling thing is if they plan to substitute the SUN renderfarm, as one of the things they like is that they can pack a lot of power in slim racks (14 CPUs on each last time I heard). Maybe they got more space at Emmeryville now ;-).

      You do know that Apple announced they will start making rackmount G4s right? No details were given however, but it is one more piece of the puzzle.

      • Someone mentioned it to me but I wasn't sure if it was true or someone pulling my leg. Now I learned something today.

        Still I wonder if this came out as an edict from Jobs. I wonder if they would get the same performance per cubic unit from the G4 racks as from the SUN ones. They didn't have much space left when they were at Point Richmond, so space considerations for the renderfarm were important. And if I remember right Pixar had a deal with SUN, though probably it doesn't mean anything. One more piece of the puzzle though it still doesn't fit nicely. After all it was less than a year ago that they gave that info that they were moving to Linux and rewriting almost everything for it. Darwyn Peachey is one of the top people there. If that's the case then I guess there was a lot of wasted effort. though since all is *nix it probably wasn't so bad.

        Or maybe it's like the fabled ILM/SGI agreement in which supposedely ILM couldn't mention ever any use of hardware beside SGI in exchange for a sweet deal, even though they were using other stuff there. Maybe that'll be the case, only OS X will be publicized even though some other stuff might be on the background. Time will tell.
        • It would seem to me that most render farms will continue to use what they're currently using ... solaris, linux, etc ... I think Apple's more interested in Pixar using OS X machines for desktops, not for machines doing grunt work ... G4s are nice and all, but they're still commodity processors, not really comparable to the power and scalibility of Sun's offerings or even Intel's offerings (in that arena).

          That makes sense, right?
          • That's true - the rendering farms would be more cost effective on Solaris or even cheap Linux boxes. However I can't help but wonder if Apple isn't planning a special OSX - server that is designed more for IBM's Power offerings rather than the G3/G4 chips by Motorolla. Yeah they'd lose some of the features that are important for the OS. But Apple's got to be getting pissed at Motorola by now. . .
    • In general if you can do a port to Linux the port to OSX will go that much faster. Usually the only programs that have problems are ones with special UI or that do low-level OS tweaking. I suspect that most of the custom stuff is non-UI based. But if there is some, this would be an excellent place for Apple to test what they need to do to make OSX better.
  • This would help cut down on overall staffing costs, because rather then have a base of dedicated Unix/Solaris admins and Windows NT admins and Linux admins (or whatever combo of that). They can just use a single platform for all of it, and the best part for them is the interface is Mac. No offense to artists (my wife is one), but they aren't the most tech savvy, so the Mac enviornment (which sheilds em pretty well) is whats best for em and gives them a warm fuzzy.

    • Doo doo doo! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Amiasian ( 157604 )
      Sorry, but in defense of the Mac, I've seen real world examples where many of the best programmers in the world were Mac users. And Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the Web, used NeXT, which is basically Mac OS X today. Okay, there are differences, but the concepts are the same.
      Sorry, but the rumor about Mac-heads/artists not being technical simply isn't true. Heck, if it was, there wouldn't be an "Apple" section on one of the most technical discussion boards [apple.slashdot.org] around, would there?

      Just wanted to dispel rumors that really are *hack-cough-wheeze* unfounded, in many cases. But, don't worry, rumors are that way: unfounded.
      • No, he's saying that the best platform for non-technical types is the Mac. He's dead-on.
        That's the beauty of the system. It's much kinder to people who don't know, or don't want to know, how the guts work, but if you want to get under the hood, it's the best platform for that, too.

  • Did I read a different article than everyone else here? Because it seems to me that while Pixar will be using Macs for storyboarding and other such work, the actual rendering will still be done by their Linux-based renderfarms...?

    --R.J.
    "Listen Different" golf shirts! [digiserve.com]

    • The distinct implication (can you actually say "distinct implication"?) here was that while pixar is currently just programming storyboard programs in cocoa, that they would be making the move over to using OS X for more serious stuff in the future.

      I can't imagine that it would be too difficult for pixar to port their current rendering software over to OS X... plus it would be a great advantage for pixar (having the connection through steve jobs to apple), as they would almost be guaranteed apple's top notch technology. (or is this a false assumption?).

      While the depth to which pixar will be using macs is unclear, I'm just glad that they're starting to make the transition: OS X has great potential, and I think we'll see the hardware catch up sometime soon. (holding my breath...) This would yield a very powerful OS on top of a very strong hardware setup.

      • I can't imagine that it would be too difficult for pixar to port their current rendering software over to OS X... plus it would be a great advantage for pixar (having the connection through steve jobs to apple), as they would almost be guaranteed apple's top notch technology. (or is this a false assumption?)
        To play devil's advocate:

        Apple's top notch technology wouldn't be good for the renderfarms. Those are all about speed, and the fastest Mac is about half as fast as the fastest PC. And Macs really fall short on memory-intensive tasks in dual processor configurations, owing to the slower bus speed. (The fastest Mac memory bus is 133MHz. The fastest PC bus is effectively over 1GHz.)

        Even if Pixar got the Macs for free and had to pay market price for the PC racks, it's likely that the cost of electricity from the additional machines needed would take away the Apple benefit in under two years. This is to say nothing of extra maintenance when there are twice as many machines, the value of the extra space used, and the cost of porting the render farm software over to the new system architecture.

        • Macintosh G4 computers may have half the processor clock speed of Intel-based computers. However, due to their more efficient RISC architecture, and the "Velocity Engine" vector-math unit, they are capable of performing complex graphic operations much faster than equivalently priced Intel-based computers -- two to three times as fast in some cases.

          The computing needs of Pixar undoubtedly rely heavily on vector math. Therefore, using a computer architecture that is expressly optimized for vector math is probably a good idea for them.

          Don't fall into the fallacy of equating clock speed with performance.

          • The computing needs of Pixar undoubtedly rely heavily on vector math. Therefore, using a computer architecture that is expressly optimized for vector math is probably a good idea for them.

            Vector math and bandwidth. All current Mac designs are utterly choked when dealing with large data sets, owing to the 133MHz RAM clock.

            If you want a good idea of the relative speeds for render farms, take a look at some Maya benchmarks. The 933MHz G4s with 2MB L2 cache realize about 2/3 the speed of 1GHz Intel chips, and about half the speed of 1GHz AMD parts.

            I don't know how well-tuned Maya is for the G4 vector instructions, but one would expect that Pixar would have less of a programming budget for these kinds of optimazations than a company who's actually selling the software in a competitive market.

            • Re:Misleading headline? (Score:3, Informative)

              by Anonymous Coward
              PIXAR is selling their software. The Renderman Toolkit that is used by many of the top animation and effects studios is developed and sold by PIXAR. It has also run on several different platforms in the past (including both 68K and PPC Macs as well as NeXT/OpenStep based systems). They also developed and maintain their own in-house animation software which they use instead of other's programs (such as Maya).

              Actually, they basically started making animated films to showcase their software.
            • "I don't know how well-tuned Maya is for the G4 vector instructions, but one would expect that Pixar would have less of a programming budget for these kinds of optimazations than a company who's actually selling the software in a competitive market."

              I do. Not at all. I beleive that hardly any Maya code is multi threaded either. I'm sure Maya runs best on a high clockrate platform right now, Apple may be able to change this quite soon - so maybe this story indiates that they WILL.

        • OSX on AMD guinea pigs? (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Here's a thought...where could Steve Jobs seed prototype hardware that really doesn't need Carbon support. What about OS X running on AMD boxes and running homegrown Pixar apps written in or ported to Cocoa?

          I'm one of those non-technical artist types but it seems that would be a natural environment for Steve to quietly try some new stuff that uses the best of both worlds.
  • At least Steve is backing his own products now. Real question is how long have Pixar being using clusters of the new rack-mounted systems? Or testing any other nice hardware. With many render farms being linux (or other nix) based, OS X does seem like an ideal solution given powerful enough hardware. You can create a solid workflow of machine on a common platform that just about everyone in the team can use. OS X does after all have a friendly GUI as well as the powerfull backend.
    Guess renderman is on Darwin/OS X now too then :)
    • All it would take would be a recompile to get it working, and some optimizations to get it right. Renderers are the easiest useful applications to port, especially renderman renderers, because of the text and bytestream communications in the standard. Optimizing them for the processors is the only thing that would take time.

  • Predictable - really? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SpamJunkie ( 557825 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @06:45PM (#3499791)
    Yes this does seem all fine and predictable given that Steve Jobs is CEO/iCEO of both. But really the interesting part is how long it took.

    I hate to keep bringing up Microsoft, I really do, but remember when hotmail was bought by MS? Right away MS forced them to convert their Sun servers to NT. And, remember all the problems that resulted?

    What is really impressive then about Pixar switching to Mac OS X is that Steve J let them wait until OS X could do everything Pixar needed.
    • I am sure that Steve Jobs lets Pixar be run. If he said 'Use Mac OS 8' from now on a long time ago, Pixar badass, The Man, the virtuoso who started it all Ed Catmull, would have said 'guess what? fuck you! that's what!'. There is no way they could have done anything on Mac OS or OS X until now. I am sure they are switching because with the closeness with Apple, Macs are the best thing to use now, and no other reason. They won't be straight Mac OS X for a while now anyway, they do have 3000 sun machines to replace, which they will as needed, not to satisfy a publicity stunt.

    • Re:Predictable - really? (Score:5, Informative)

      by BitGeek ( 19506 ) on Saturday May 11, 2002 @08:15PM (#3504007) Homepage
      Ok, as apparently the ONLY person here who was actually AT the Pixar "announcement" its time to dispell some false assumptions.

      First off, this wasn't an announcement. This was one guy at WWDC telling a bunch of developers about how Pixar goes about making movies. He did that and he also talked about OSX. He showed an app he developed in OS X in 10 days that was pretty cool and useful to Pixar. He sung the praises of OS X and said that Pixar has been using OS X more and more.

      He mentioned, and showed a picture, with all the linux and sun machines in the renderfarm.

      He dispelled the rumor that had been going around that Pixar was going to announce Renderman for OS X (but gave no indication which way whether it was a possibility.)

      Jobs did not lay down the law to make Pixar switch. IT hasn't even switched, or announced switching. It has only said that its using OS X more and more, and that the guy on stage was persnally loooking forward to the new rackmounted servers.

      Also, Jobs DOES own pixar. That is, as much as anyone who owns a public company can. He owned it outright before it went public. So, whateve the public and employees don't own is owned by him. After getting fired by apple (Almost a death warrent for apple) he learned his lesson.

      So, while he could lay down an "edict" this is the kind of conspiracy theory that online geeks like to engage in, as it makes it easier to ignore the reality that the better product won.

      The Mac hardware packs far more punch in a given amount of space (with rackmount cases, anyway) than any other os/hardware combination out there, other that *possibly* Sun boxes that cost a whole lot more.

      It is also provides the best development environemnts- bar none- currently shipping. Hell, it has top of hte line support for Java development, Objc/Cocoa, Classic development, and Unix tools.

      And, it also is worth pointing out that while Microsoft and Apple both announced "object oriented operating systems" way back in 1991, in 2001 Apple actually delivered one. Yes, next delivered it before, but the power of OO in the OS is really rapid, quality app development. something that, unfortunately, linux will never have ,given its develoepers preferences for 1970s era development styles. (I'm talking vi/emacs and proceedural OS layers)

      But I digress. You guys should be busy going out and figuring out how to get redezvous in to Linux- an Apple technology apple is encouraging you to copy- than worrying abou the fact that OS X stole a major customer win from Linux. Get used to that- its the natural result of picking the Windows Lookand feel for your windowing system, among other things.

  • bypass the maccentral link... (Score:4, Informative)

    by h0tblack ( 575548 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @06:54PM (#3499840)
    ....and go straight to the original story:
    http://developer.apple.com/wwdc2002/pixar. html

  • Pixar software ran on NeXT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grouchomarxist ( 127479 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @07:01PM (#3499866)
    One interesting thing to remember is that Pixar software used to run on NeXT. They probably pulled some code out of the archives as part of work on Mac OS X.

  • in a related story... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jeffehobbs ( 419930 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @07:04PM (#3499879) Homepage
    Steve Jobs has announced that he himself will be personally doing most of the end user desktop tech-support. This move alone is expected to lower the number of internal Pixar reported trouble reports to near 0.0%.

    ~jeff
  • I wonder if the recent announcement of Apple making rackmount computers has anything to do with this.

  • Jobs isn't that stupid. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sure, he may be arrogant, but Pixar's bot the kind of thing you just monkey around with on a whim. It's a huge moneymaker, and they're extremely well-respected in the industry. Jobs isn't going to just order them to switch to OS X unless it's viable.

    Undoubtedly, the upcoming rackmount servers probably play a role, although I'd be surprised if they plan on using Macs for rendering.

    Chances are Jobs worked out a deal with Pixar where they'd get assistance porting their current software to OS X (since their software is Linux based, I'm guessing it's a bit easier to port to OS X than the old Windows code), and get to play with new hardware and such, in exchange for the great PR Apple gets in announcing that Pixar is using OS X. And of course, buckets of money are undoubtedly involved. Aren't they always?

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