I’m wondering if anyone’s got any information about how well these CPU’s handle rendering chores. I’m guessing there’s not a lot of support in Blender for the ARM processor, since it would require recompiling, but the intels seem to handle straight-up XP like a normal processor.
I’m about to buy a pretty hefty machine, but you can pick up desktop systems with 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom CPU’s for like $200 or less even… I’m wondering if it would be worth it to get 5 or 6 of those to use as a renderfarm. I’m guessing these things cost a lot less to run in a server / network than your typical server systems. You can get blades on New Egg for less than $100 with 200w power supplies, but I imagine that’s overkill for these things. Dual-core CPU/mobo for $100, add a couple gigs of ram and you’re looking at about $200 - $250 for a nice rack-mountable dual-core 1.6 Ghz server blade… Get a few of those and you’re looking at one hell of a nice little render farm for about the same cost as one high-end PC, and at about the same power consumption as well.
I hope these processors make setting up an indie renderfarm more viable and more cost effective.
Anyway, if anyone has one of these processors, lemme know how they handle Blender and how the render speeds are (and maybe use one of the various test .blend files that they have been using to test 2.50 with)… I’m just curious how they handle floating points… There has to be some catch to them that I’m just not seeing…
My netbook has an Intel Atom [email protected] and 1gb of DDR2. OS is WinXP
Rendering the eofw bench test.blend in 2.49b with 2 threads and x/yparts at 8 it renders in about 8m26s.
I suspect rendering with command line and/or a light linux os could help in addition to messing around with the settings. I’m pretty sure Atom is also only single core, though XP shows two processors in Task Manager, leading me to believe it has hyperthreading (in case you were wondering why I chose 2 threads)
Later today I’ll put a 2.5 build on there and try with that I’ll play with the settings too and see what I can get.
They do have some dual core Atoms. I think the 330 is the only one right now that supports it, but I’m only guessing based on what I’ve seen on various websites.
ARM is set to release dual core ARMs as well. Honestly, I think the ARM processors are much faster than the Atoms, but they don’t use the same architecture, so you have to use a different kernel and recompile apps to use it i guess… don’t know all the details. I know the OpenPandora project uses ARM processors and a lot of cell phones. Microsoft and Apple have both gone on record saying they’d never release a compatible OS for those processors. Linux saves the day again.
However, no compatible version of Blender exists as far as I’m aware. I’m going to buy a Pandora when they get released (hopefully by the end of the year :D), and i was hoping to get Blender on there so I could do some light 3D doodling while I’m out and about. Might be a possibility later on.
But yeah, that seems really low. My current, crappy PC can render it at about half that time. Interesting. I’d definitely be interested in more results. There’s an Atom 330 listed on there that got the job done in just under 3 minutes. That seems like it would be workable in a farm.
Rendering the same scene with the same setup in 2.5 (r23890 build by DingTo on GraphicAll) gives a time of 3m56s (rendered twice, one was 3m55.97 and the other was 3m55.64). So rendering in 2.5 took about 46-47% of the time that 2.49b took. Again, tweaking it, using different builds, command line rendering, etc etc could probably yield lots of different/better results
Microsoft and Apple have both gone on record saying they’d never release a compatible OS for those processors. Linux saves the day again.
Actually, the iPhone uses an ARM, so Apple technically has released an OS for ARM processors (just not in general). Linux does have ports to ARM, but not every distro necessarily has one, and they aren’t necessarily efficient (though the core kernel is fairly so).
However, no compatible version of Blender exists as far as I’m aware. I’m going to buy a Pandora when they get released (hopefully by the end of the year :D), and i was hoping to get Blender on there so I could do some light 3D doodling while I’m out and about. Might be a possibility later on.
For Blender Core, I believe it’d work with just a straight C -> Arm ASM compiler since I’m fairly certain there’s no inline assembly in any of the core. For its libraries it might be a different thing that would require finding a port.
My guess is Pandora will eventually run Blender, but at the same time, I could probably build a Pandora clone before they release even their first. Even then, there will probably be interfacing issues to work around likely…
ARM is a much newer and cleaner architecture than X86 and does away with all of the legacy X86 garbage which almost all computers are lugging around.
Its thanks to X86 (and Windows) why everything has become so stagnant with regards to innervation on the desktop' when compared to hand held computing, sticking with X86 and the antiqueibm pc clone’ architecture isnt going to go anywhere.
I remember ideasman clearly stating blender compiles & runs just fine on an arm cpu.
As for which is better for rendering slaves?
intel, intel owns amd and intel owns arm’s as far as octree/kd-tree’s go as far as I know, and they have the hyper-threading,
which tends to help a lot as well, plus there’s the ssse3(well phenoms have sse4, but your obviously speaking low-low-cost).
Yes the 330 iirc is a dual core quad threaded(thans to the hyper-threading.
I’ll play with the settings too and see what I can get.
