Pixar uses CPUs …
I wonder if we’ll end up in a situation like rendered movies.
Where the big studios like Pixar uses CPUs (not GPUs) to render their movies due to the cost/perf (and access to larger amounts of RAM).
I wonder if we’ll end up in a situation like rendered movies.
Where the big studios like Pixar uses CPUs (not GPUs) to render their movies due to the cost/perf (and access to larger amounts of RAM).
But that's already been changing, and we are seeing studios moving to fully GPU based pipelines. Wylie Co, who are a major visual effects company (Dune part 1 and 2, marvel movies, the last of us, a bunch of others) are now a 100% GPU shop. The trend is towards more and more GPU rendering, not less.
With AI providing another strong incentive towards increasing the amount of VRAM on GPUs, I don't see any reason to believe that trend will reverse.
And it’s expected to at least support GPUs.
Not sure how much sense it would make for Pixar to spend a lot of engineering hours for things they wouldn't touch in their own rendering pipeline. As far as I know, most of the feature development comes from their own rendering requirements rather than from outside customers.
I wonder if (or when) this will change once integrated GPUs become "mainstream", the CPU/GPU share the same RAM AFAIK.
> CPU/GPU share the same RAM AFAIK.
This depends on the GPU I believe Apple has integrated memory, but most GPUs from my limited experience writing kernels have their own memory. CUDA pretty heavily has a device memory vs host memory abstraction.
Customers like Pixar could probably push this even further, with a more recent Nvidia rack and Mellanox networking. Networking a couple Mac Studios over Thunderbolt doesn't have a hope of competing, at that scale.