[geeks] Apple vs. Sun

[Shawn Wallbridge]

Joshua D Boyd wrote:

>On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 02:17:33PM -0600, Shawn Wallbridge wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Since this is my job, I can say that
>>
>>a) people are very unlikely to use either Sun or Apple machines for 
>>rendering. It just isn't cost effective. As crappy as PC's are, they are 
>>still fast at crunching numbers. And we need the BIGGEST bang for the 
>>buck. No Apple or Sun (AFAIK) can touch a Dual Athlon 1800 with 2GB of 
>>ram for price/performance at RENDERING.
>>    
>>
>
>What about the administration costs?  Also, has any comparison been done
>about actuall rendering speed using optimized software or are we just
>saying that because the software has been optimized for x86 and not
>Altivec, the Athlon must be a faster machine?  
>  
>
We have written a lot of things to make administration easier, but I 
think running a *nix OS would be even better.

We don't have access to source for most of the software we use, so 
personally I can't tell you if it's just the x86 optimizations.

Eyeon did benchmark on a Mac running OSX and it was slower than the 
equivalent priced PC (i can't say about altivec, since they didn't 
mention it).

>It seems to me that Pixar and Ilm both use non-x86 hardware for their
>render farms, although they are certainly far from typical.  Has anyone
>compared low end Sun servers against similarly price x86 machines
>running PRMan?  I don't think I've ever seen such a report.
> 
>
Nope. ILM is moving to PC's running Linux, and I have heard through 
unofficial channels that Pixar is seriously looking at PC's as well.

The _little_ benchmarking I did wasn't very scientific, but an SM41 
(running Debian) was about 6x slower than a PPro 200 (running Debian) in 
Povray. That doesn't really mean anything because we are talking 32bit 
SPARC vs a P6. I might try to get Povray working on my U30 (250MHz), 
Octane (175MHz), and a PC (depends, 300MHz up to 2x1500MHz) this week 
and really test them to see what is faster.

>  
>
>>b) GigE for a renderfarm is just too expensive. At $400CAN per GigE 
>>port, that's just too much. We run 100Mb to our 80 slaves, and it isn't 
>>the greatest, but it works. We are starting to keep textures on the 
>>local machines to reduce the amount of network traffic.
>>    
>>
>
>Is your render farm just 3D rendering, or does it also get used for
>rendering fusion files?
>
>  
>
Both. Right now we are just finishing up a show and it is going to be 
heavy 3D today, then move on to 2D tomorrow until the rest of the week. 
GigE would be great for 2D, but still REALLY expensive.

shawn