dave@imax (Dave Martindale) (05/02/90)
I received a letter from Pixar yesterday. This is an excerpt from it: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am writing to tell you that Pixar has agreed to sell our Image Computer division to Vicom Systems, Inc. of Fremont, CA. As you may know, Vicom is a leader in the image processing marketplace with an impressive installed base of customers. This division will transfer to Vicom as a self-contained unit. All employees in the image computer division will be making the move, including division management, development, sales and customer support. The physical location of the division under Vicom will remain close to Pixar's current Marin County site. The decision to sell the Image Computer has not been easy -- we take great pride in it, but, our business goal is to be a graphics software company. [remainder of letter deleted] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The letter was signed by Charles Kolstad, president. At the Pixar user's group meeting at last summer's SIGGRAPH, it was apparent that Pixar didn't seem interested in doing any more hardware development. I guess this is just the logical conclusion of that. I'm disappointed, since my interest is in the Image Computer hardware and its software, not RenderMan. It remains to be seen what Vicom does with the line - whether they just provide minimal support for the existing hardware, or continue development. Dave Martindale dave@imax.com
rick@hanauma.stanford.edu (Richard Ottolini) (05/03/90)
In article <1990May2.154503.9201@imax.com> dave@imax (Dave Martindale) writes: >At the Pixar user's group meeting at last summer's SIGGRAPH, it was >apparent that Pixar didn't seem interested in doing any more hardware >development. I guess this is just the logical conclusion of that. Special purpose hardware has trouble keeping up with improvements in general purpose CPUs and software. The latter are doubling in capacity about every year. A relatively small company such as Pixar would be lucky to ewngineer new hardware every three to five years. For example, Sun is migrating its TAAC image processing software, very similar to some Pixar software, to general purpose Suns (SunVision being demoed at conventions). Today's SPARC-1 is one third the speed of a TAAC board, but next years SPARCs or SPARC clones may exceed it. RenderMan IMHO follows a similar philosophy. (Incidently, SunVision implements RenderMan.)
ksakotai@hawk.ulowell.edu (Krishnan "krish" Sakotai) (05/04/90)
In article <1990May2.154503.9201@imax.com> dave@imax (Dave Martindale) writes: >I received a letter from Pixar yesterday. This is an excerpt from it: > >I am writing to tell you that Pixar has agreed to sell our Image Computer >division to Vicom Systems, Inc. of Fremont, CA. > < deleted> >At the Pixar user's group meeting at last summer's SIGGRAPH, it was >apparent that Pixar didn't seem interested in doing any more hardware >development. > <deleted> As one who has been following Pixar's pioneering efforts in the Graphics/Image processing area for many years, from the formative stages of Lucasfilm, I was sad to note the above developments. Pixar seems to be redefining its goals too frequently for people to get a good idea of its line of activity. I do not know how well Vicom can take up the good work done by the people behind Image Computer. Regarding Pixar President's statement about its wanting to be a graphics software company, I think they have come a full circle from the Lucasfilm days, when they were primarily a graphics/animation company. So does this mean one more competitor for companies like Wavefront, TDI, Alias Research etc ?
dave@imax.com (Dave Martindale) (05/04/90)
In article <1185@med.Stanford.EDU> rick@hanauma.stanford.edu (Richard Ottolini) writes: > >Special purpose hardware has trouble keeping up with improvements in >general purpose CPUs and software. The latter are doubling in capacity >about every year. A relatively small company such as Pixar would be >lucky to ewngineer new hardware every three to five years. > I can see this argument for software like RenderMan. It probably runs faster right now on a fast SGI box than it ever did on the Pixar Image Computer. But the PIC is basically a fast image-processing box, with 16-bit integer arithmetic, and was never particularly well-suited for floating-point-intensive operations like rendering. At one time, perhaps, its plain raw speed made simulated floating point on the PIC faster than real floating point on a VAX or Sun, but that advantage was bound to evaporate as general-purpose CPU's catch up. But, as I said, I'm not interested in RenderMan. I'm interested in the Pixar hardware. The PIC has a much better memory organization and video hardware for handling large images. You can put 32 million 48-bit pixels of memory in the PIC (if you can afford it!) and treat it as one single image. Or configure it as 42 1024x768 images. Or almost anything else you want. The memory is just a big linear address space, and the video controller can be configured for a nearly-arbitrary starting address and per-scanline address increment. And each pixel is stored with 12 bits of RGBA, though only 10 of those go through the lookup table. If someone else was selling a replacement for the PIC, it wouldn't bother me too much. But I don't know of one. Other vendors typically have a fixed-configuration frame buffer, where each pixel on screen has a fixed location in memory (at least when zoom is off), and with no capability for expanding the size of the frame buffer. So the only way to display really large images is to have lots of non-display memory, and repeatedly copy a selected window of it to the display as you pan around. Even the Pixar II did this. In addition, most vendors think that 24 bits/pixel provides "true colour". This can't provide the full brightness range that a CRT (or film) is capable of while avoiding banding artifacts under all conditions. Pixar stored 12 bits per component, with a reasonable scheme for avoiding underflow and overflow when doing things like interpolation. All processor data paths are 16 bits/component. In short, Pixar seemed to care about dealing with "film-quality" images, which are necessarily large in both spatial resolution and pixel bit depth, when nobody else was. Most other vendors don't seem to understand film at all. It's sad to see Pixar leave that business too. Now, I know nothing of Vicom, and maybe they do care about film. But my impression of image processing companies to date is that they can't understand why you would ever want more than 8 bits per component. Dave Martindale