Yes,
But did they switch over entirely? By the article, I'd say no, and
for good reason, there are just some things you can do on an SGI that just
don't happen elsewhere. I will agree that IRIX is a bit of a pain out of
the box, I think that re-compiling my kernel is a pain in OR out of the
box... REally, teh companies we're discussing here are private sector,
profit based, they have profits to answer for and their motivations are
based on the bottom line more so than cooltech. I don't blame them, and as
I said, if it works better, I'll be the first in line for hten next movie,
but there are some parts of what theya have now that cannot be replaced by
what they are going to. I didn't see much about the rendering farms, I saw
one snippet about the Origin2k, but that was not made clear if it was a
rendering server or not. Most of these companies (at least as it was
explained to me by an SGI salesdrone) have contracts with studios that
allow them to purchase equipemnt for the project at hand off the projects
budget, and they get to keep it in the end of production. They do buy
Origin2Ks for file servers sometimes, I think it would actually be a bit of
simplification to think that ILM ran off one origin for it's server, that
would easily explain why they felt that SGI had no performance, but that
wasn't said, I didn't see anything other than price comparisons, and that
tells me it's a money motivator, not better tech, or worse, just that they
see where they can cut and save, and that's good, they're running their
business as they should. I agree with them, they are responsible to their
employees and their stockholders (if they have any), so these are good
decisions, I'm just stating that I don't htink the reasoning behind these
changes is based entirely out of a better technology overtaking something
else. I don't see that at all....
mbutler
I think Pixar switched to linux also.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2761566,00.html