Industrial Light and Magic, the company responsible for the special effects in Star Wars, has switched from using RISC-Unix workstations from SGI to using Intel-based Dell systems running Linux for the bulk of its animation and special effects work, according to c|net. The switch included the purchase of 600 Pentium 4 workstations. “The Intel workstations that were deployed were probably 20 percent of the price of SGI workstations we bought a few years ago. Performance-wise, they are about three times as fast,” said Cliff Plumer, ILM’s CTO.
