Also, I am highly dubious of Intel's engineer's ability to convert anything in AVX space.
Yes, they are a bunch of screw ups.
Q1 2008:
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/...n-and-johnson-to-rise/
Santa Clara, California-based Intel remains the leading maker of semiconductors. In the past year, its revenues were $38.3 billion and its net income totaled $6.97 billion. Its EPS growth forecast for the year is 9.7%, which is better than the technology sector average and the S&P 500.
1. They have the worst record in high-end graphics of any major competitor in the space
Hmm, Intel does Apple Mac; I think they are pretty good in that space.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=wall-e.htm
Wall-E: ~ $140,000,000 dollars in about 2 weeks.
Pixar built out with Intel in 2003:
http://digitalcontentproducer...._pixar_builds_massive/
Pixar's new RenderFarm, used to create the digital images for each frame of animation in its movies, will consist of 1024 Intel Xeon processors inside of eight new RackSaver BladeRack supercomputing clusters running Pixar's own RenderMan software. The RenderFarm features two terabytes of memory and 60 terabytes of disk space. Each Intel Xeon processor at 2.8 GHz is about five times faster than the older RISC-based processors in Pixar's outgoing RenderFarm. Pixar is using the system for its film, "The Incredibles," scheduled for a 2004 release.
That Render Farm did "The Incredibles": it was OK, but I guess those disabled Intel engineers weren't able to come through for them.
Each BladeRack contains 66 dual-processor servers in an innovative arrangement that provides excellent cooling for very dense clusters. Pixar worked closely with RackSaver and Intel on the design of the systems, which are built around the tailored Intel SE7500WV2 server board. Pixar also utilized the assistance of Intel Solution Services and the sophistication of Intel compilers and performance tuning tools to boost the performance of their RenderMan software by 50 percent on the Intel-based systems.
Here's a picture of it: looks pretty professional to me: 2006 photo.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetwilitekid/85940485/
2. Most of the guys who can write those tools already work for either Lucas, SKG, or Disney.
One word V:
school. Books and teachers. Young kids, new faces. Lots of energy, new ideas. Or, are we to assume that in a few decades, when all the people at Disney and SKG die off that we will go back to black and white film?
Cal-Arts, USC, UCLA....and, people like the guy who did "Sky Captain" on his Mac at home....there are lots of them out there, eager and willing to use new tools and ideas to create cool new stuff. [Note: yes, I know Sky Captain sucked.....but you have to give the guy credit....]
a 40x increase seems a bit silly
"640K is enough for anyone". "There is a total world market for about 4 computers".
I remember reading back in the early 80's that IBM did some tests with people off the street with their new dual floppy 8088 IBM PC. Looking at the DOS ">" prompt, one guy typed in "What is the capital of Ohio?", or something like that, and of course got an error message: there was much hilarity from the human interface testers....it's about 25 years later: type that into Google, and get the capital, the mayor;s email and phone #, a satellite photo of the city that can show you people in their back yards pools, guides, blogs, web cams and on and on. It's friggin amazing.
Intel helped a lot with all that.
I have a feeling that the new Intel hardware and software are going to work fine; not perfect.....there will be bugs and issues to address....but I think the Intel Engineers will do fine.