DreamWorks Animation and Intel have formed a strategic alliance to revolutionize 3-D filmmaking. The move is expected to further DreamWorks’ goal of rendering all its films in stereoscopic 3-D, beginning next year.

The trailblazing animation studio says it plans to employ Intel’s visual computing products and tools for composition creation, beginning with the film Monsters versus Aliens, slated for release next March.

“Technology plays a significant role in enabling our artists to tell great stories,” said DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg. “By utilizing Intel’s industry-leading computing products, we will create a new and innovative way for moviegoers to experience our films in 3-D.”

Tera-Scale Performance

Under the agreement, Intel’s software engineers will optimize DreamWorks’ applications to run on the chipmaker’s advanced multicore processors. DreamWorks will need thousands of such chips to create and modify high-quality images.

“When Hollywood does special effects, they have far more computing potential at their disposal than what can be found in

the most extreme editions of today’s personal computers,” said Jeffrey Howard, a technology strategist at Intel’s Microprocessor Technology Labs. “Quad cores are actually pretty quaint when compared to render farms filled with hundreds of cores.”

To bring that kind of computing into a personal computer, one has to think a lot bigger in scale, to the point where trillions of operations can be computed per second, Howard explained in a recent blog. “In Intel’s Microprocessor Technology Labs, we signal that Tera-Scale,” he said.

Intel’s future chips for 3-D applications will be based on a new processor architecture for visual computing that is expressly designed to achieve Tera-Scale performance. Code-named Larrabee, the new architecture will integrate a high-performance, vector processing unit (VPU) with acceleration enhancements. Intel plans to offer its first public demos of Larrabee later that year.

Meanwhile, the work continues on Intel’s next-generation 3-D technology for home theater,…

Original post by Top Tech News