BlenderNation

Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

Blender Appearance at Intel Core i7 Launch Event

33
By on 3D News

Randall Rickert (professional 3D animator, used to work for Not a Number) showcased Blender at the new Intel Core i7 launch event.

Randall wrote:

It wasn't exactly mentioned by name in the keynote address, but Blender was on display at the launch event for Intel's new Core i7 (a.k.a. Nehalem) Extreme Edition processor last Monday (November 17) in San Francisco.

Intel became interested in showcasing Blender after their engineers discovered that Blender was one of the applications with the most dramatic performance benefit from the new chip. They made the discovery by running rendering benchmarks on assets from Big Buck Bunny. The Core i7 has four cores and handles eight simultaneous threads, and if you've payed attention to Blender development you would have noticed that the default number of threads for Blender's renderer was recently changed from two to auto. Good timing, devs!

I was at the launch event showing 64-bit Blender running on 64-bit Ubuntu Studio, displayed on three screens. The displays are pretty blown out in these photos, but you can see the Blender interface on the big screen above my head. The scene files are from my television work, including an upcoming show about turkeys for The History Channel.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

33 Comments

  2. iceweasel on

    AMD rules!!

    This is not because "Intel" had some success with "Core" architecture that you have to forget they weren't often the best around or at the "vanguard".

    Reply
  3. agile on

    Will someone make blender benchmark update? If someone want to start some useless "AMD vs Intel" discussion then my advice is NOT ON THIS SITE. And besides, We all really need fresh breath and no monopoly....

    Reply
  6. JackD on

    Hey guys,
    you should'nt think that they will buy a 3DSMax license for a demo!!
    Is Blender the best tool for demos??!
    Is there a SVN that supports the Nehalem?? I don't think so. Blender doesn't support Intel 8-Core-Systems at 100% at all!
    And it's a kind of childish to search for a display with Blender on it on tec-fairs!
    If you don't have other things to do, OK!!

    Reply
  14. Toon Scheur on

    What was tested? Render performance? Is the OpenMP for cloth and fluid sim working already? Fluid sim would be some eyecandy for the onlookers to show to.

    Reply
  15. Spamagnet on

    @JackD wrote: "There's only bla-bla!!!"
    If you have a point, you might want to write something a little more comprehensible.

    Reply
  21. banor on

    Excellent, great to hear. Maybe Intel will come out with an even better processor and this one will drop in price if I decide to build a computer soon (with help.) :)

    :)

    Reply
  26. shul on

    @agile: usually when AMD comes with new CPUs they start a price war with intel on per-performance bases (so a lower end CPU by intel will be out-priced by a higher end CPU from AMD)

    Reply
  27. Randall on

    Hello Joeri!

    Not to feed the troll, but the reason this show didn't feature expensive animation software is not because Intel can't afford it. It's because this event was for the release of a consumer-level chip, where Blender has a big presence. The machines at this event were built as high-end gaming systems. Some time later they will release the first server/workstation-level chip with this architecture. At that event, they will have the expensive software that is commonly run on expensive hardware. This is what I hear from Intel people, but I don't work for them and I don't speak for them.

    About the other computationally intensive parts of Blender, like dynamics, I guess it's just a matter of time before more parts of Blender are threaded. Not long ago, only a very few users had multiprocessor machines. Now, multiple cores have become mainstream, so threaded software will become much more common. The price of these chips will surely come down, just as they always have.

    Reply
  29. GabySoft on

    In the comp shop im working already bring on the i7, we are showing it to the clients. I could take some minutes to test blender on it. Anyway, must be the most cpu fast for blending, because the mem benchs like two fsb1333 cpu's, even with a cheap ddr3(CL9). And with the new HT implemented ... i will give some number today to the blender benchmarks.

    Reply
  31. agile on

    I know that most of people still are using dual cores, But the question is how much is Blender scalable? It will really perform better on more than 4 or 8 cores?

    And maybe it is good time to speak about Blender performace in rendering in general. Not everyone can afford for such workstations or renderfarms....

    Reply
  32. agile on

    WHHOOPS! I have checked out blender benchmark site, and i7 occupies 134 place! looks like is much more weak than Q6600...
    I am really disappointed.

    Reply

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×