Rafal123 Posted August 1, 2006 Share Posted August 1, 2006 check it out people: http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/07/31/mercury_...elerator_board/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rafal123 Posted August 8, 2007 Author Share Posted August 8, 2007 some new infos from this field, check the benchmarks: http://www.mc.com/uploadedFiles/Cell-Perf-Simple.pdf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc Posted August 8, 2007 Share Posted August 8, 2007 ...er.. wow. looks a little too good to be true . oh, first link doesn't work btw.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joe Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 BTW, it's real: http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/b2b...ease/31008.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cellchuk Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 wow that sounds pretty cool ha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rafal123 Posted August 9, 2007 Author Share Posted August 9, 2007 hey Joe thanks for link, "A prototype Cell Computing Board will be showcased in the Sony booth at SIGGRAPH (Booth #1249) as part of Sony's 4K digital content creation pipeline." , so anyone seen it on Siggraph? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digitallysane Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 To be honest, I'm not very happy about this. To me it looks like wasted time when it comes to SESI. They lack behind significantly when it comes to GPU usage in Houdini and now they are involved in developing for a product with very weak chances to being successful, both because it will be subject of Sony's strategies (and Sony isn't a known provider of tools for the 3D market) and because of strong competition (Nvidia, who is an established provider of the 3D market, is formidable competition and the GPU computing gets much more interest than Sony's experiments with their new architecture which they are trying to invent markets for). Really, is SESI, a small company, the one which should help Sony and maybe bet its future on such unsure products and technologies? Dragos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sibarrick Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 They are a pretty smart bunch over there and never jump into new technology without careful concideration (from what I've seen of their developement to date anyway) It could be a very smart move to get into new niche markets and the potential for exploiting some of the largest markets - eg games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rafal123 Posted August 9, 2007 Author Share Posted August 9, 2007 Really, is SESI, a small company, the one which should help Sony and maybe bet its future on such unsure products and technologies?Dragos don't worry so much Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
symek Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 (edited) They are a pretty smart bunch over there and never jump into new technology without careful concideration (from what I've seen of their developement to date anyway) It could be a very smart move to get into new niche markets and the potential for exploiting some of the largest markets - eg games. ...or some big studio will love to setup mantra-based renderfarm on Cells. Mantra is, as I suspect, enough self-contained application that it wouldn't too much effort to compile it on Yellow Dog Linux to run it smoothly on Cells with x10 increase of performance per dollar. sy. PS because I think it's all about mantra or possibly batch, not whole application. Edited August 9, 2007 by SYmek Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rdg Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 ...or some big studio will love to setup mantra-based renderfarm on Cells. This sounds reasonable. could be a very smart move to get into new niche markets and the potential for exploiting some of the largest markets - eg games. I don't think it is a smart movie to morph a highly specialized application in to a all-in-one application suitable for every purpose. Apart from the fact that Houdinis modularity, proceduarism and architecture likely is the most suitable of all apps to generate content for almost anything. I don't know about maya, but max claims to be suitable for feature film, visualizations, architecture, games and everything else. If these apps where games - max would be pacman (because of all those walls) and houdini would be GTA ... Georg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
symek Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 (edited) I don't think it is a smart movie to morph a highly specialized application in to a all-in-one application suitable for every purpose. SESI used to develop game technology.The impression that they have only Houdini in repositories it's quite naive . I don't remember name for it though... Edited August 9, 2007 by SYmek Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digitallysane Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 ...or some big studio will love to setup mantra-based renderfarm on Cells. Time will tell, but I hardly believe that. Why would I base my render farm on such an exotic product? It is fast, it's true, but the only software I could run on it would be Mantra and HBatch. Not very appealing. How much would those Cell based things cost? That "some big studio" you mention would need to run a bunch of software on their render nodes, not just Mantra. At the same time, I already have a GPU in my computer which could be put to some use to accelerate the fluid simulations and rendering and VEX and deformations etc (if some dev resources would be put into that). Also, NVidia is pushing strong and at this Siggraph, they partnered with Mental Ray and others. That is, with a popular renderer. They have devkits, software, momentum, industry attention and a product that is already in any workstation, just waiting to be put to work. http://www.cgchannel.com/news/viewfeature.jsp?newsid=6366 I agree that from a performance POV the Cell is probably much better, since it's actually a real proc, not a GPU, but that is not a guarantee that it will catch on. My opinion is that it won't, actually. It would require the involvement of too many developers and too much dedication from Sony. Not only that, but Sony has always been about proprietary stuff, the notion of open systems and interoperability is alien to them. I do wonder if the people from Imageworks are porting their internal tools on Cell, if the technology is so promising? Dragos SESI used to develop game technology.The impression that they have only Houdini in repositories it's quite naive . I don't remember name for it though... SESI intended to develop game technology but abandoned the idea. The codename of the product was Proceed. Dragos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digitallysane Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 They got mental images on board, too: http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/b2b...ease/31006.html Dragos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rdg Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 quite naive you are right - I even have some links for this proceed3d: http://del.icio.us/rdg666/houdini%2Bgame I think it's ok to have one working product instead of a dozen half cooked, tough. the notion of open systems and interoperability is alien to them I think you can add "customer support" to this list Georg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
symek Posted August 9, 2007 Share Posted August 9, 2007 (edited) Time will tell, but I hardly believe that. Why would I base my render farm on such an exotic product?(...) [/url] I have similar doubts to yours. Just a little more convinced... The point is that it's enough to have mantra, mental ray and prman running on Cell to consider it as a renderfarm platform. Plus if there is a decent dev platform on it (as Yellow Dog seams to claim), you can fairly easy port your "Storm" and such on it. It is exotic, that's true. But if you can compile Linux on it, you're not so far away from a point you want it. Now saying that you miss the main thing with a Houdini. Houdini is intent to work with renderfarm behind. See all these small features, hooks, batch tools and so on! Nvidia just because of it's nonsense to build infrastructure of GPU based farm directs its service to smaller players. Whenever it's worth to try multiplying workstation render power by 2 or 3, Nvidia solution can shine. But in case of RenderMan and Mantra and MentalRay this workstation's power increase gives you 5% in a whole system. As I understand you have a small studio. You don't have to use a farm at all. Like many others you can use these e.i. 10 cpu in 10 PC in house. Multiplying this by 2-3, you see the sense of investment in GPU aid rendering. In case of 1000cpu renderfarm and 50 workstations there is on such conclusion. cheers, sy. Edited August 9, 2007 by SYmek Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thekenny Posted August 10, 2007 Share Posted August 10, 2007 (edited) It is easier for them (SESI) to get mantra working on a cell and get it to be complied to take advantage of all the power that is there. Doing the same for Houdini proper to work with MulitCore computing is a bit more of a pain. the DeformSOP for instances (meta deform) is multithread so when it cooks you can see the extra cores on your machine kick in and it speeds up dramatically. But for the other non-threaded operators it isn't using the extra CORE so you get a slow down. there are other ways to get the power into the application, but it requires a layer (like RapidMind's layer) to allow you to focus on the extra cores. Really the buzz at siggraph was not so much about the GPU and multi GPU s but multi CPU and Cell technology. word is the IBM intel team is doing this right now and it will be comparitive to the GPU(multi) rendering solution. The cellcomputing will have a large impact on this industry.. it will be cost prohibitive for a while but nonetheless it will hit the larger studios faster. A number of people from studios were commenting on the fact that with the multi core machines they could render much faster than they could on the farm. In the renderman user's group they played a capture of the real time bucket render of the truck from CARS on a flat grey background one was a single proc and a single Dual core of similar speed. the CORE machine rendered the image in a 6th of the time as the other machine. The showed stats in renderman 13.5 displaying increases upwards of 4x as fast. ILM provided some data that demonstrated they were able to match the projected 6x savings from the machines. I think you will all agree this is a huge topic of sigificant impact to our industry. -k Edited August 10, 2007 by thekenny Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rafal123 Posted March 2, 2008 Author Share Posted March 2, 2008 another interesting article with Cell: http://www.theage.com.au/news/articles/new...3788327976.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peship Posted March 3, 2008 Share Posted March 3, 2008 Sony funds sidefx to port Houdini to Cell, but the first step of the roadmap is to get Houdini multithreaded. Does not matter what the destiny of Cell will be - we should get one better multithreaded Houdini out of this. From what i hear Intel cooks some realtime raytracing built into their CPUs ( and if the rumor is true - this will not be the half baked i740 chipset, but the other way around ), i think nVidia will have some real problems soon - they seem to start freaking out already. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
photex Posted March 3, 2008 Share Posted March 3, 2008 i think nVidia will have some real problems soon - they seem to start freaking out already. I wouldn't say that they have problems, just competition. I worked in a visualization lab for a bit and our clusters were nvidia based nodes that drove huge lcd walls (in stereo, with headtracking). This of course wasn't for offline rendering, but now these machines can be dramatically updated by adding one or two gpus for other kinds of processing. This is a big advantage over the competition right now. I'm glad that this path of computing is taking off with so many people in the market. I can't wait to see what my next machine will be like. Sony funds sidefx to port Houdini to Cell, but the first step of the roadmap is to get Houdini multithreaded.Does not matter what the destiny of Cell will be - we should get one better multithreaded Houdini out of this. Agreed, this might be why I'm so happy about the whole deal. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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