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From: rick@hanauma.stanford.edu (Richard Ottolini)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Pixar sells hardware division to Vicom
Message-ID: <1185@med.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 2 May 90 21:37:44 GMT
References: <1990May2.154503.9201@imax.com>
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Organization: Stanford University, Department of Geophysics
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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.)