BERLIN, Germany (October 28, 1999) -- mental images® GmbH & Co. KG announced today that its mental ray® rendering software product is one of the first workstation applications to run on Intel's first engineering samples of the IA-64 Itanium™ -based platform.
On August 31, 1999, Intel Corporation's president and CEO Craig Barrett in his keynote presentation revealed the first public Itanium™ -based platform demonstration to the attendees at the Intel Developer Forum in Palm Springs, California. Barrett demonstrated the Itanium™ processor (then code named Merced) on an engineering prototype platform running an early version of Microsoft's 64-bit Windows operating system in conjunction with mental ray.
mental images and Intel have been working closely on the development of a version of the mental ray rendering software product, ported and optimized specifically for Intel's Itanium™ processor. mental ray's 600,000+ lines of C/C++ code were ported to and optimized for the Itanium™ processor using a number of subsequent versions of Intel's development environment for the Itanium™ processor and verified to run on a complete emulation of the Itanium™ -based platform. This in turn permitted an independent verification of the emulation by means of a comparison of the resulting image with the same images rendered on an Intel Pentium® III Xeon™ processor based platform. The importance of the fact that the results were identical had already been pointed out by Craig Barrett in his keynote presentation at the Workstation Leadership Forum in June of this year.
mental images' high-performance, photo-realistic rendering software mental ray is widely acknowledged to be an industry leading rendering solution. It is the only commercially available rendering software which combines the physically correct simulation of the behavior of light with full programmability for the creation of any imaginable visual phenomenon.
"We are extremely pleased with the result of our close working relationship with Intel. With this successful simultaneous demonstration of an engineering prototype of the Itanium™ -based platform and of the execution of our code on it we have accomplished the most important milestone of this project as part of our cooperation," said Rolf Herken, President and Director R&D of mental images. "We are confident that mental ray is ready for IA-64 and will be available concurrent with Itanium™ -based workstations and servers availability. Our software will leverage the performance potential of the Itanium™ processor and future IA-64 processors to the greatest extent possible. This will allow mental ray customers and users to take advantage of the unique computing capabilities of the IA-64 processor family."
"Intel and mental images achieved a significant milestone in their respective IA-64 programs by demonstrating mental images’ mental ray software on Intel’s first engineering samples of the Itanium™ processor, our first IA-64 processor" said Anand Chandrasekher, General Manager of Intel's Workstation Products Group. "mental images, a recognized leader in providing image rendering technology for use in DCC and CAD applications, has actively supported the Itanium™ -based platform. We look forward to developing a fully optimized version of mental ray which will ship at the launch date of Itanium™ -based systems from industry leading vendors expected in the second half of 2000."
About mental images. mental images, founded in 1986, is a recognized leader in providing rendering and surface approximation technology to the entertainment, CAD, scientific visualization, architecture and other industries where sophisticated images are required. mental images is a privately held company based in Berlin, Germany. The main product of mental images is the high performance, photorealistic rendering software mental ray, which is capable of running on a wide variety of platforms, ranging from workstations and networks of workstations to parallel supercomputers.
Customers of mental images include original software developers such as Dassault Systemes S.A. (www.dsweb.com), Autodesk, Inc. (www.autodesk.com), (www.discreet.com) and Avid Technology/Softimage (www.avid.com), (www.softimage.com) as well as major industrial end-users such as DaimlerChrysler. Users of mental ray include most of the leading special effects and digital film studios, game developing companies, and companies in the automotive and aerospace industries.
Additional information is available at www.mentalimages.com
mental images and mental ray are registered trademarks of mental images GmbH & Co. KG. Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks, and Itanium and Xeon are trademarks, of Intel Corporation. Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
For information, contact: Silvia Hanko, ++49-30-315-9970, office@mental.com