Pipeline,Production

New sponsor: Intel

4 May, 2015 |  12 Comments | by Ton Roosendaal

I’m happy to now officially announce that Intel has signed on as a Platinum sponsor of the Gooseberry project! They’ve sent us two amazing servers for our studio server rack, almost doubling our render capacity. The servers are from their demo and testing pool, experimental hardware configurations that get seeded for testing and feedback.

Each server has:

  • Two E5-2697 Xeon processors, 14 cores, 2.6 GHz
    (They handle 56 threads just fine!)
  • 64 GB of DDR4 memory
  • Very low power consumption (350W)

We’ve been using the systems for a little while, and they’re already indispensable! It’s almost as fast as the old Justa Cluster (16 x i7) together. But that cluster was from 2010 — it’s about time for Moore’s law to come back to the studio. :) Read the first render test statistics here.

Thanks, Intel!

-Ton-


12 Responses

  1. Ville says:

    Congratulations!

    Just being curious. What is the estimate price for that hardware, if bought from store now? Single cpu is more than 3000€.

    • Neil Burgin says:

      My understanding is that it’s experimental hardware, so it CAN’T be bought from a store now.

      • I wouldn’t be surprised if (this or next year) servers with this performance would be sold for a price between 5-10k euro.

        • Varghese says:

          They gave some super-processors for ‘Puss in Boots’ realtime rendering. I heard that almost two years ago. Now gooseberry is about to get some good juice. WAY TO GO

      • Ville says:

        Well.. it says that the configuration of that hardware is experimental. By given specs, the parts are not very rare or anything. I was just thinking how much it would cost when put together.

        I beleave that the retail price would be more than 30k€, but less than 60k€.

  2. yacinedelucia says:

    that’s great!.. i guess these are E5 2697 V3 as the memory is DDR4.

  3. Man this is great news for blender allround….can`t wait to let people around me know that the movie they just saw(Gooseberry) was made by a free dutch 3d program(being a chauvinist dutch guy, as Always..:))…huray…

  4. Totally awesome, thanks Intel!!

  5. UltraMosk says:

    2 Xeon are practically equal to sixteen i7 with only 350W!!!????

    You guys made a major upgrade of nearly double power over the “old” render capacity and only added a few more watts in the electricity bill? That’s insane.

    (Excuse my bad english, i’m only a enthusiast 3D dude born in the spanish side of the world :P)

    • One system (with dual xeon) renders at least as good as 7 of our i7 systems. For a much lower power consumption. I think it’s because the clock is set relative low.

      • UltraMosk says:

        Thanks for your reply!
        7 is still a amazing number. I wish you good luck with the movie :D

  6. Benxyz says:

    Great news ! It’s a huge improvement for the workflow, rendering twice faster will give much more time for artists to improve the movie !

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