Intel and Dreamworks SKG made a joint announcement yesterday naming Intel as the movie studio's premier solution provider going forward. This new deal replaces a previous (and expired) three-year contract AMD signed with Dreamworks back in 2005. It's unclear what impact the loss of Dreamworks SKG's patronage will have on AMD's bottom line, but such arrangements are potent PR for any company attempting to prove (or maintain) that it's products are a match for the competition.

Unfortunately for AMD, current Phenom/Barcelona products simply aren't up to the task. Back in 2005, the AMD/Dreamworks contract was hailed as both a triumph for the company and as further proof that the then-fledgling x86-64 technology push delivered real benefits. Fast forward to the present-day, however, and the two companies have flip-flopped. Now, AMD is the manufacturer struggling to deliver a competitive product, while Intel is capable of delivering quad-core Yorkfield processors today, Nehalem at the end of the year, and Larrabee in the not-too-distant future. Dreamworks cited both Larrabee and Nehalem in particular when discussing its decision to move to Intel-based production platforms, as well as a need for more powerful CPU's in general that the movie studio feels will be best accomplished with Intel processors.

This is not to say that Dreamworks and AMD have completely called it quits. Dreamworks owns a number of rendering farms (with up to 5,000 cores in a farm), and the company obviously won't simply shovel all its AMD hardware out the door when the first shipments of HP-built Intel systems roll up. Depending on the type of systems Dreamworks previously deployed, AMD might actually still see a fair bit of business from the company; Socket F (1207) systems that initially shipped with 90nm dual-core Opterons should be capable of using Barcelona or Shanghai processors. Dreamworks has not announced any AMD-centric upgrade plans, but a solid Shanghai debut in six months could make this option particularly compelling.

Software optimizations play critical role

Dreamworks' decision to switch CPU vendors is not entirely driven by Intel's roadmap. According to the president of production at Dreamworks Animations, John Batter, Intel is also assisting the studio with animation software development. "Our animation tools are all proprietary here," Batter said. "Intel is rearchitecting our software tools... to take advantage of multicore and make our renderer highly scalable as well as making our character animation tools highly scalable."

That's the sort of offer AMD would have a hard time competing against, no matter how strong the company's product line was, and it highlights a key disparity between the two CPU manufacturers. Intel is often capable of offering incentives (financial or otherwise), that AMD can't match, even when the company is firing on all cylinders. In this case, the battle is particularly important. Going forward, Intel will deploy an advanced, next-generation set of vector instructions the company is calling AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions). AMD, meanwhile, intends to deploy its own vector-extension SIMD, under the moniker of SSE5. Both are meant for HPC and high-end graphics computation, but the two SIMD instruction sets will not be compatible with each other.

AMD must think it has a chance to push its own SSE5 into the market, but Dreamworks' decision to go Intel (and accept their assistance in software optimization) could lock AMD out of that contract long-term, or at least make reacquiring it substantially more difficult. If Intel and AVX deliver a performance level that AMD can't match without the use of SSE5, and all of Dreamworks' animation tools are optimized for AVX, well, why rearchitect for an entirely different set of vector instructions when there's no performance advantage to doing so? It's a canny move for Intel, and it could signal a return to the Bad Old Days of SSE vs. 3DNow! in years to come.