Reaching Out To Apple Users

Mr. Boswell says that AMD wants to reach out to Apple users. He says that they are passionate, want to succeed and continually push the limits of hardware. Companies that are hesitant of throwing away the Macs on the desktops can gracefully grow into the AMD architecture by migrating their render farms to AMD Opterons. This migration would be transparent to the end user, as many Mac fans would rather face a fiery death than to have their Macs taken away.

Benefits Of 64-bit

Mr. Gregoire said that switching to the 64-bit Opterons has freed up available memory for the RAM-hungry Maya animation software. 32-bit processors promise to access four gigabytes of RAM, but in reality this is misleading.

If an artist's workstation has four gigabytes of physical RAM, it may only have 1.4 to 1.7 gigabytes of available RAM for render jobs. Why is this? The Windows operating system and the Maya application eat up a large chunk of available memory, leaving less than half (in some cases) for rendering. Mr. Gregoire laments that render jobs would blow up for lack of memory, but that was before getting the Opterons.

With the Opterons and a beta version of 64-bit Windows, JAK Films and many other studios have been putting Maya into a virtual 32-bit workspace, thereby giving a complete four GB of RAM to Maya. This four GB limit will remain until Maya is rewritten for native 64-bit execution, which probably won't happen until Windows comes out with the official 64-bit version.

Benchmarks

Surprisingly, it is hard to find objective and detailed benchmarks pitting the Opterons versus the Apple G4/G5s. It's even rarer to find dual CPU to dual CPU comparisons. A quick Google search did find a dual Opteron versus dual G5 test done by Barefeats . The testing methodology may be questionable, but at least it gives you some picture of how the two CPUs perform against each other.

Interestingly enough, on Apple's PowerMac G5 page there are charts of CPU performance, but the Opteron is missing. On another Apple PowerMac G5 page , you can see the Opteron is missing once again from the Lightwave chart.

Conclusion

Will the Opteron boot Apple from the top of the movie industry computer heap? Only time will tell, but with its use in completed projects such as Star Wars Episode Two and the upcoming Episode Three, there is little doubt that AMD intends to make a good run at toppling Apple.