animation – Movin' Ahead

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In the final weeks of 2011, I drove to Berkeley to interview the founder and digital artists at McNeil Studio to hear first-hand about their first experience using cloud computing services to create a fast-moving animation based on paper origami designs.

I shot a video and wrote this article for Intel Free Press — Cloud Computing Democratizes Digital Animation — focusing on the impact of cloud computing — paying for on-demand supercomputer power from datacenters owned by Amazon. The story also appears in Silicon Valley Watcher.

The idea of sending pieces of a render job out to different computers to crunch was novel and felt somewhat risky, but the results, the speed and the cost all had the McNeil Studio team singing the praises of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing service.

I was also drawn into the actual creative process and how they turned
paper origami figurines into an engaging animated story for my employer,
Intel, which wanted to redesign its consumer technology website with
examples of how people can use their computer to do amazing, dazzling
things in life.

I crack up at the penguin scene.

The final version is at Intel’s Unfold What’s Possible site.

Moving to the Cloud (vendio.com)
Amazon’s Cloud: A Supercomputer Anyone Can Rent (mashable.com)

Lots of buzz about the the big investment in Facebook that set off calculation artists to figure the funnest site on the virtual planet is valued at $15 Billion. Wow! My advice: Don’t buy it!! Let it live, breathe and be free to grow…at least for a while longer.

Here’s something just announced today by the company I work for, Intel. Press release is pasted below. But my mind is swirling, connecting numbers. What do they really mean? At a cost of $3 Billion, Intel’s new Fab 32 chip making plant in Arizona is rapidly pumping out nearly a billion newly minted Intel transistors onto each multi-core chip coming out soon. OK, actually on the new quad core chips, it’s estimated to be about 840 million newly designed transistors built using Intel’s Hafnium-based high-k metal gate silicon technology.

Press Release from 10/25/06: Intel is opening its newest state-of-the-art microprocessor factory (called Fab 32) in Chandler, Ariz. as it prepares to ship its first 45nm processors on Nov. 12.

Context: Manufacturing capacity and modernization are key differentiators in today’s competitive market for microprocessors. Intel invests heavily in its global manufacturing network, including a $3 billion investment in Fab 32, to ensure it can meet the demands of the market, and is quickly ramping production on its 45nm process technology. Two more 45nm factories will open next year.

Relevance: With 1 million square feet and more than 1,000 employees, Fab 32 is Intel’s latest environmentally friendly factory that will manufacture tens of millions of the most energy-efficient processors the company has ever made. These processors are based on Intel’s groundbreaking transistors with Hafnium-based high-k metal gate silicon technology, the biggest change to how transistors are made in 40 years.

Here is a fun, educational animation shared during the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco last month. Following the animation is a video shot inside Intel’s fab and research facility in Oregon in January when Intel first showed working processors build with the new, smaller, energy-efficient transistors.

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[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/01/PID_001917/Podtech_Intel45nM_revised.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/1971/intel-says-45-nanometer-microprocessors-due-later-this-year&totalTime=520000&breadcrumb=f95f77e3bf70418e890278dbcaff10c0]