erm Wine is Not an Emulator ;)

" Myth 1: "Wine is slow because it is an emulator"

When users think of emulators, they think of programs like Dosbox or zsnes. These applications run as virtual machines and are slow, having to emulate each processor instruction. Wine does not do any CPU emulation - hence the name "Wine Is Not an Emulator."

Some people argue that since Wine introduces an extra layer above the system a Windows application will run slowly. While technically true, Wine is no different from any other software library in this regard; even newer versions of Windows must load extra resources to support older applications.

Importantly, the combination of Wine and Unix can sometimes be faster than Windows itself. This is especially true when the system has good drivers and the application isn't exposing any Performance Related Bugs*."

http://wiki.winehq.org/Debunking_Wine_Myths

as to your notes on pixar's renderman...I don't have a clue what you mean? it seems you think A: they built on linux for security? (they built Renderman on Linux back in 89 when windows networking was still shaky and they ran it on the old O2 workstations ) and B: it costs millions (same as 3D Studio Max actually).