OT: Re: CPUs and XSI/mental ray... 2005-06-22 - By Brad Friedman
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Nothing bothers me more than the silence though...
We've all seen the dual core thing coming for maybe a year or more now.
And I still can't manage to find an offiicial word on the matter from
mental images. I realize there's a "its done when its done" attitude
toward making feature promises and releases... but this is not a
feature. This is a business and licensing decision. And generally
speaking, we all need to be making forward looking decisions on hardware
and renderfarm design. And the silence is not helping.
Furthermore, the dual (And soon to be tripple, quad and so on) core
situation simply brings up another problem thats been clearly in sight
and unaddressed: low power chips in render farms.
Look at the chips from transmeta:
http://www.transmeta.com/
Look at these desktop computing clusters based on transmeta chips:
http://www.orionmulti.com/
Look at similar chips and boards from VIA:
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/
On their own, these systems are underpowered. But as a cluster (as
shown by the orion systems) they're quite formidable and could save a
lot of money on computing power and electricity. However, since mental
ray prices per CPU, they're a no go. You can't afford to use a low
powered chip with a mental ray license. its a waste of cash.
Multi core CPUs are based on the same general principal though... rather
than build a faster single chip (which was becomming very difficult) go
parallel with less powerful chips.
Take it for granted: its a powerful trend that needs to be addressed by
mental images, and in general, by all rendering solutions that have $$
licensing schemes attached to them. Were it not for the rendering
license scheme assuming the licensee is buying the fastest CPU available
at any given time, these solutions might be plausible and infact, save
money, as they are designed to do.
Last I checked, most online render farms charge by work units equivalent
to a gigahertz-hour-on-a-xeon-p3 or something similar (they compare the
power of their current machines to a baseline and charge accoringly in
multiples). I would think mental images would do well to realize a
similar potential work unit, and charge for a license that can be used
on as many CPUs as it takes to generate a given ammount of work units in
a given ammount of time. It seems to me to be fair all around.
excuse my rant :)
-brad
Wayne Williams wrote:
>Hopefully MentalImages will take a cue from their steadily growing list
>of cheaper competitors and let it be seen as one. It would only help
>them solidify their market share that much more...seeing as how they
>ship with maya/max/xsi already.
>
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