High Tech Meets Hollywood in “Ratatouille”

Intel’s partnership with Pixar serves as yet another example of how cutting-edge technology can benefit a range of industries — specifically, entertainment.

Several months ago we wrote about how film and animation studios are using blade servers for the high-performance computing that’s required to render sophisticated special effects. More recently our partner Intel — whose Xeon™ dual-core chips we use in our own R2200 series PC blades (PDF) — worked with Pixar to create and render “Ratatouille,” an animated film about a rat with aspirations of culinary greatness. High-quality animation now relies on parallel processing, and the Intel® Xeon™ 6100 chip delivered.

“Intel supplied Pixar animators with enough hardware support and software tools to launch a rocket to Mars,” writes InformationWeek’s Michael Singer. The end result was, if not a rocket to Mars, at least some flashy renderings of water, bubbles and other hard-to-execute effects.

Greg Brandeau, senior vice president of technology at Pixar, said in a prepared statement that

“Intel’s advanced computing capabilities helped Pixar bring ‘Ratatouille’ to life faster than ever, delivering a 30 percent performance improvement in the computer-generated animation and visual effects rendering software.”

Whether you’re animating rats or trying to improve corporate end-users’ experience, a performance increase of nearly one-third can’t do anything but help. And that, for us, is what this story is all about. Technology once firmly in the realm of the corporate, scientific, and academic — as high-performance computing and parallel processing were — is now finding that it’s useful for a whole range of purposes. If many tech breakthroughs start out in the consumer market and move slowly into the corporate world as cautious, budget-conscious IT departments recognize their value (smartphones are the latest example), Intel’s trajectory may prove to be the reverse.