[geeks] Apple vs. Sun

[Shawn Wallbridge]

Dave McGuire wrote:

> On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 02:21 PM, Chris Hedemark wrote:
>
>>>> Sun has 100Mbps ethernet.  Apple has 1Gbps.
>>>
>>>
>>>   Irrelevant.  No current desktop applications will get anywhere 
>>> near that.
>>
>>
>> 1) NLE
>
>
>   Never heard of it.  Can you provide a readers' digest version?
>
>> 2) Render farming
>
>
>   On DESKTOPS?  Umm, no.


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.

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.

shawn