The Evolution of Internet Search

Google released a short video today highlighting some of its key milestones in search over the past decade. It’s both a fun blast from the past and a worthwhile reminder of how much things have changed over the years. 

Image Engine Immortals

FX Guide talks to Image Engine about the work on Immortals. Mike chats to vfx supervisor Simon Hughes and Executive Producer Shawn Walsh about the film, which was shot in Montreal.

Direct link HERE.

1 TeraFLOPs on a chip

14 years ago, in 1997, Intel demonstrated the first supercomputer capable of achieving 1 TeraFlops by combining 9,680 Intel Pentium Pro CPUs.
Today, Intel unveiled the first chip based on its MIC (Many Integrated Cores) architecture: "Knight's Corner".

It is a single CPU with 50 computing cores, reaching over 1 TeraFlops in one chip. According to Intel,  "the result is a fundamentally new architecture that uses the same tools, compilers, and libraries as the Intel® Xeon processors. 

Intel already foresees a combination of many Intel® MIC processors surpassing the next big milestone: the exaflop barrier."

As a frame of reference, a six-core Intel i7 CPU peaks at 109 GigaFlops.

1 GFlop = 10⁹

1 TeraFlop = 10¹² 

1 ExaFlop =  10¹⁸ (that number would be read as "10 followed by 18 zeros", or "one quintillion" calculations per second) 

More at INTEL.

Nvidia MAXIMUS

NVIDIA Maximus-powered workstations combine the industry-leading professional 3D graphics capability of NVIDIA Quadro® GPUs and the high-performance computing power of NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs. Tesla co-processors automatically perform the heavy lifting of rendering or CAE computations, freeing the Quadro GPUs to do what they do best—enabling rich interactive graphics.

Nvidia MAXIMUS

Earth is AWESOME!

How can one not stare in absolute awe at the beauty of this little blue marble we live on?

Watch this in HD with full-screen ON!

Katana is out.

The Foundry has finally released the first version on their website and announced ILM has already purchased a site license.

Katana was developed at Sony Imageworks and has been their core lighting and look development platform for a fair number of big productions.

 Paired with either Arnold or PRman, Katana is reportedly a tremendous performance boost for artists lighting and shading 3D assets and environments.

Katana is Linux-only at this point, and price is undisclosed at The Foundry's website. Trust me, this in not software for the "shallow-pocketed" and "faint-of-pipeline".  This is a tool for studios with solid Linux pipelines and cash-fluent production revenues...

For more details, check out Katana's website.