“The number of transistors on a chip doubles every 24 months” – Moore’s law.
In simple words Moore’s law states overall computing power for computers will double every couple of years.
Moore’s law created a significant impact on the power-hungry creative industries especially Visual effects and 3D animated movies.
Pixar founders Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith used Moore’s law to anticipate the future 3d filmmaking. According to Alvy Ray Smith, They waited 5 years to align with Moore’s Law schedule and started making the first 3D animation movie.
Silicon Graphics Inc – SGI
In the 1980s if you were doing anything intense computing in Visual effects you were doing it with SGI hardware.
In April 1993 Silicon Graphics and Industrial Light and Magic announced a joint venture was called Joint Environment for Digital Imaging–the aka JEDI. Films like Abyss, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Animation in Beauty and the Beast, and Each of the Toy story 1 shots were all created on Silicon Graphics computers.
For 8 continuous years, all movies nominated for a Visual Effects Oscar were made on Silicon Graphics computer systems. The 80’s SGI workstation was one of the first supercomputers commercially available in the market. According to IMDb, various VFX studios used Silicon Graphics workstations in more than 40 productions between 1993 and 2003.
SGI was the leading Computer hardware provider for Hollywood visual effects studios.
Silicon Graphics dominates the high end of computing where workstation prices started at $40,000 and ran as high as $1 million.
The release of ’90s movies made the whole world see computers as the main tool for creating photorealistic characters.
Collapse of Technology
In the late ’90s, the competition slowly caught up. A single SGI workstation costs around $50,000 – $1,00,000 and the companies began to sell cheaper workstations. This forced SGI to introduce mid-range affordable workstations. This was the point of Moore’s law in action.
The Sun Microsofts, NeXt, Apple, Intel, and IBM became the toughest competitors for SGI. In the early days of Pixar also sold workstations and later refocused on creating 3D animated movies.
