I did look at professional render farms and one in particular was boasting, 3.0 Tera Hz Computing Capacity with 1000 CPUs of Xeon 3.0 GHz and Minimum 2 GB Memory for each of those CPUs.

Also they use customized software, and mainly deal with 3SMax and Maya.

I was hoping to not only speed up my own renders but also help out others in the community.  If I had the budget I would probably build a few Dual Core Processor CPU's, but were looking at around $10,000+ to build a decent set.

I think Bryce Lightning was added as a nice feature to help a little, but not optimized to its full potential.  Although Pentium III's are now oudated and slow compared to whats available now... they do far exceed the minimum requirements from the Bryce 6 page, which are Pentium Processor or Compatible,700 MHz (1 GHz or faster recommended),512 MB RAM min (1 GB recommended)

I think Bryce and Bryce Lightning could be optimized even more to get better render times with the hardware setup I have.