The Force is with you, young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet. But HP plans to get itself some knowledge of the Force when it works on a technology contract to prop up visual effects works for Lucasfilm. Little is known at this stage about the multi-million-dollar contract which spans three years, but it likely that HP will provide between 1,000 and 1,500 high-performance workstations and storage to the high-profile film company. The move marks the beginning of a new partnership between the two firms.
HP's Workstations Marketing Director, Jeff Wood, said Lucasfilm will use its new AMD Opteron-based xw9300 workstations, primarily for game development and special effects content creation for major films.
The executive said that, for production studios, Opteron architecture is actually superior to Intel because the embedded memory controller in the AMD chip reduces the latency of high-performance applications.