To say the least, some of the figures presented by DreamWorks are impressive: two years of pre-production, a year and a half of production, 120,000 frames for a film that lasts roughly an hour, 30Tbytes of storage, and 15 million CPU hours. All of this deals with computers.

AMD and DreamWorks originally announced a three-year strategic alliance together back at NAB on April 18, 2005. This alliance made AMD the preferred processor provider for DreamWorks Animation, after which most servers/workstations would utilize an AMD Opteron processor with DirectConnect Architecture.

So why choose AMD? We all know performance is a major aspect at which companies look at, but what other factors played a role in DreamWorks creating an alliance with AMD? Among the main factors that played a role in DreamWorks’s decision to use AMD Opteron based servers, energy consumption, platform life, and cooling needs played key roles.