Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ Film Required Over 150,000 AMD CPU Cores, Exec Says

“‘Elemental’ was their most ambitious film to date, where each character was its own volume. It had ridiculous amounts of geometry to render each character,’” says AMD executive James Knight. “Previous to AMD and Supermicro getting together, they couldn’t have done it.”

Pixar’s visually ambitious “Elemental” film required more than 150,000 EPYC CPU cores from AMD to render the movie’s materially complex characters, according to an executive.

James Knight, AMD’s global director of media entertainment, discussed the movie’s intense performance requirements and how AMD, in partnership with server vendor Supermicro, fulfilled Pixar’s needs during a panel at last month’s SIGGRAPH 2024.

Released last year, “Elemental” is a computer-animated film that features characters whose bodies are entirely composed of classical elements such as water or fire.

Knight said Pixar required significant computing power to render each character, which seemed to go beyond what the Disney-owned studio typically requires for its movies.

“‘Elemental’ was their most ambitious film to date, where each character was its own volume. It had ridiculous amounts of geometry to render each character,” he said in a conversation with CRN prior to the panel.

Knight, a visual effects veteran who has worked on movies ranging from “Avatar” to “The Amazing Spider-Man,” suggested that such computations may not have been possible without the combined technologies of AMD and Supermicro.

“Previous to AMD and Supermicro getting together, they couldn’t have done it,” he said.

In the SIGGRAPH panel, Knight put the number of EPYC CPU cores required for the rendering work at 153,000.

While he didn’t disclose what kind of EPYC CPUs were used, such processors can range from 16 to 128 cores per CPU. If the CPU was a 96-core model—the highest core count for an EPYC CPU with AMD’s standard, high-performance Zen 4 architecture—that would put the total number of CPUs in a render farm for Pixar at more than 1,500.

For years, CPU core count was one area where AMD had held a consistent lead over its larger rival, Intel, since the company debuted processors using its Zen architecture in 2017.

But Intel has pushed to close the gap in recent years, and the main way it has done this is by introducing a new efficient core architecture optimized for performance-per-watt. This, for instance, has allowed Intel to push up to 24 cores between performance cores and efficient cores in PCs, and it plans to debut a Xeon CPU with 288 efficient cores next year.

This means, however, that each core in a 24-core Intel Core desktop CPU is not directly comparable to a 16-core AMD Ryzen desktop CPU since eight of the former processor’s cores are performance-optimized while all 16 of the latter processor’s cores are.

AMD, too, has started to push out processors using a modified core architecture that consumes less power, which allowed it to max out to 128 cores last year. These kinds of CPUs, like the new efficient core processors from Intel, aren’t typically meant to handle demanding content creation workloads that are used by studios like Pixar, however.

Knight said AMD and Supermicro have made a point to be very approachable when working to meet the computing needs for content creation studios of different sizes, including Pixar.

In some cases, these engagements can influence how both companies develop new technologies in the future, he added.

“Supermicro and AMD would get together and meet with these customers. And those conversations would influence future generations of motherboards and, in some cases, our CPUs as well,” said Knight.

Photo credit: Disney