Architosh News: Mac3D News: Pixels Animation to partner with Total Impact

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	Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

Mac3D News: Pixels Animation to partner with Total Impact

5 Jul 00

Pixels Animation Studios (not to be confused with Pixar), a premier developer of 3D software has announced a strategic partnership with Camarillo, California-based, Total Impact, a leader in PowerPC multiprocessing solutions.

According to the press release:

'Pixels and Total Impact will work together to port and optimize Tempest, Pixels' extremely high end renderer, to work under Total Impact's multiprocessing Total mPower solution.

Tempest, with newly added support for the RenderMan specification, has evolved into much more than just a network renderer. "Early on in the development of Tempest, it became clear that we would need to reevaluate our entire vision of what this product should be" said Andrew Bryant, President and CEO of Pixels. "After consulting with animators and technical directors from studios around the world, we realized that work flow was just as important as rendering. We spent a lot of time ensuring that our foundation was solid before we even started integrating our rendering technologies."

"Total Impact is very pleased to be working with Pixels and is honored that they have chosen our mPOWER solution "said Brad Nizdil, Total Impact's President. "We look forward to delivering the fastest rendering solution available." '

What is the mPOWER board?

The mPOWER multiprocessing solution is a PCI-based board that holds either four G3 or G4 processors that operate in parallel and in collaboration with the main CPU. They can be combined into a multi-board system to a create a massively parallel system. Targeted at embedded applications including but not limited to imaging, telecom, raytracing (rendering), and transaction processing, these boards offer a super-scalar architecture to deliver exceptional integer and floating point performance.

Each board includes large on-chip instruction and data caches, a fast L2 cache controller, and a 66MHz 64-bit 60x bus interface. Currently the mPOWER board only supports versions of the Linux operating system on both Power Macintosh and Intel Pentium hardware. The company is reportedly working on a Mac OS X supported version.

To learn more about the mPOWER quad G3/G4 multiprocessing PCI boards click here.

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