Hi Michael....

> Maybe a couple of days.
I think you will release the next beta at Jan 21, 2009.
Base on the history, you like to release at 21 :)

Hi Anis, yes it is funny how it has been working out to be the 21st several times now! :)

This time I think probably before that though.

- Michael

i just bought a dual-quad Xeon about 5 months ago. So i'll stick with it for at least a few years. I think my next move is to build a stripped down render slave unit...

jonah

Thats great JB, I remember when I used to wait for several hours for a render to come out of the oven. ;P)

I've looked at getting a renderboxx(four quad xeon rack). The price is around $6k which is roughly the same as getting two more workstations but the space factor is a lot smaller. Plus your not using up as many resources.

When i spoke to Boxx about the Renderboxx ("Pizzabox" as they call it), they told me a price of around $2500. There is no GPU or anything, just chews the data and returns it (excrements it?) back to the master unit... So one of must be wrong about the price... Hopefully it's you! :P

I hope it is me because I'll have one sooner than I thought....must check again.

I am also holding on to a hope that 3d soft companies will be able to harness the CUDA processors that nvidia introduced. 240 processors on a unit, how sweet would that be to have stuffed into an excrement box.

Yeah CUDA is pretty crazy. What they don't tell you is you need a cooling unit (the CULA) which is the size of a small condo! :P

Heat factor. What drives your speed! Imagine your PC powering your refrigerator!???

Hi Grendel,

> I am also holding on to a hope that 3d soft companies will
> be able to harness the CUDA processors that nvidia introduced.

Some certainly will! But it is not really a great fit with every kind of software problem. Yes you've got 240 processing units in there, but each one of them is not as powerful as a regular main CPU...

It tends to be something that works well for speeding up things where you have a million pretty simple calculations that you want to get done. Rendering can often fit into this category well, and some things like particle or voxel processing is a good fit too.

But if the problem at hand does not easily split up into a million simple sub-tasks then it doesn't really fit into that area.

- Michael

The rendering is what I am hoping will fit.

Hi Grendel, have you tried nVidia Gelato yet? I think it is the main existing renderer that has been tuned to take advantage of this kind of stuff so far.

- Michael

I think Gelato is dead or going to be. Nvidia bought MentalImages (Mentalray) so I think all their focus going on that...

Michael- not yet, never seemed to get around to messing with it but I've seen good things from others who have.