On 4/17/2013 1:31 PM, Thomas wrote:
>
> If you added all the clock cycles, RAM and storage of all dozen or so
> computers in the office when I started as a software engineer you'd
> fall well short of a single Raspberry PI.
>
>
Yes, I think it's more powerful than all of the machines that were at
Pixar when I got there in 1987. When I got to the NYIT Computer Graphics
Lab in 1981, the most powerful machines were two VAX 11/780s that
provided one MIPS. But most work was done on PDP-11/34, and we had an
11/45 with core memory that ran the Evans and Sutherland Picture System
(a vector 3D engine). The equivalent of a 640x480 VGA card cost $70,000
in 1980 dollars.
By the time we had to render Toy Story, things were a bit faster, but I
think that a modern PC might outperform the entire render farm, which
was a room full of Sun "Pizza Box" workstations stacked on top of each
other, with portable air conditioners struggling to keep the whole thing
cool.
We once made a contract with Disney and they insisted that they would
get to own the render farm computers when the contract expired. We tried
not to laugh while agreeing. Nobody would want those computers by then.
Thanks
Bruce
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