We report today that animator Dreamworks will phase out its dual-core AMD Opterons and replace them with yet-to-be-launched  Nehalem server chips and Larrabee graphics processing units. The company needs to boost computing power because it wants to make all its productions in 3D from next year.

Journalists who attended HP's recent techfest in Berlin saw experimental 3D footage of scenes from latest Dreamworks 2D epic Kung-fu Panda, and very impressive they were. They do require polaroid glasses to get the effect, and we watched only for a few minutes so it was hard to judge if the eyes would feel strained after watching a full-length film.

Processing 3D takes roughly twice the computing power of 2D, according to Dreamworks, but it would be interesting to know what the figures are for storage and transmission. There must be a lot of scope for compression because of the similarities between the twin images. This could be significant, not only because of the implications for 3D film downloads and streaming. The most-used 3D application in future could turn out to be video phones.

I saw a relatively crude 3D phone system demonstrated at Cebit in 2004 running over a 384Kbit/sec link. You did not need special glasses for it but even at the relatively low resolution used I judged the difference between 2D and 3D videophoning to be rather more than the difference between mono and stereo audio. And, in theory at least, 3D video calls should not need not very much more bandwidth than 2D.