While the movie may have been terrible, it turns out that the technology powering some of the CGI in Transformers was stitched together by commercial, off-the-shelf components.
According to TGDaily, the company behind some of the rendering used the power within top-end ATI GPUs from the 2X00 generation. That’s great news for consumers and developers, and not-so-good news for Intel who has invested swaths of both labor and financial resources to develop Larrabee (though according to Ars, it still has a couple tricks up its sleeves).
Based on the interview it turns out that ray-tracing high-quality video in real-time will be a reality many moons before the previous estimates I discussed a few months ago (1 2 3).
This interview was also germane because a clever code hacker was recently able to get the CUDA version of PhysX to run on ATI cards. Talk about a coup, because Nvidia just paid top dollar not only for the physics-frenetic firm, but also in transcribing it into their development language.
Oh, and before I forget, if you’re in the market for a new system including a video card, do not buy an integrated video solution from Intel, not even if it is based on their latest GMA 4500 chip. I’ll mention more later, but let’s just say that 10 shader processors is a far cry from the competition.
One of the popular obituaries currently making the rounds is that of David Caminer, who is credited with inventing the first business computer. He created it to provide accurate accounting for a large tea company in England.
The statement that stuck out for me was an old gem from the popular science publication NewScientist: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.”
Not to minimize his inventiveness, but as Plato’s old saying goes: necessity is the mother of invention.
For instance:
- To manage its call centers and ginormous network infrastructure, AT&T developed Unix, the core operating system underneath Mac OS (BSD) and one that heavily influenced Linux as well as Windows NT… the core kernel that runs every Windows OS since 2000 (WNT was created by the guy who made VMS for DEC — and yea, Unix arguably influenced the design/structure of later variants of VMS). In fact, thirty years ago, you could purchase a terminal made by AT&T. It certainly would seem weird if they developed one today, right? (the Supreme Court essentially forced them to exit that market place).
- Nintendo has been around for over a hundred years. It started as a card maker (like Poker cards) and evolved substantially over time.
- Flickr, is known as a popular web-based photo portal. However, before its web 2.0 days the development team originally created tools for an online role-playing game. They shelved the game and a few years later made bank when they were bought by Yahoo.
In fact, everyone knows at least a handful of other inventions that took odd twists and turns before becoming common place in kitchens. I mention several of them in Urban Legends of NASA: What They Did Not Invent.
Sticky notes have a colorful history too. As do submarines and dynamite! (hint: the modern developers saw their potential fulfilling peaceful, civilian matters).
