DreamWorks Animation SKG has announced that it chose Intel to supply the chips that the animation studio will use to make the transition to 3D animated films. This way, AMD will lose one of its most prestigious clients, taking a strong blow that comes just when the company is passing through a rather bad period of time.

The animated studio, which has previously used 1500 HP servers and 1000 HP workstations powered by AMD microprocessors, will now switch to devices made also by HP, but powered by Intel, AMD’s biggest rival on the market. DreamWorks Animated officials have said that the company chose Intel because of the next two chip series it has announced. AMD considers that they will provide much more computing power than the ones AMD offers, and that this way they will help DreamWorks artists in their job.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animated, said that the new Intel chips “are radical game-changers for the entire field of computing” and that “for our artists, the impact is going to be really nothing less than monumental."

The new chips that made Intel DreamWorks’s choice are the octal core Nehalem family and the Larrabee, which will be used for the management of graphical operation and resources in computers and animation stations.

Since 2005, the animation studio has relied on the chips offered by AMD. The microprocessor manufacturer is however confident that the studio might someday come back to its products. After all, it remains for AMD to convince DreamWorks to choose it as a partner when the deal with Intel ends.