[geeks] Apple vs. Sun

[Joshua D Boyd]

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?  

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.
 
> 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?

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd