Well, if you have some spare cash lying around and want your renders to zip right along you might want the newest NVidia Supercomputer.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_computing.html

Got a spare $10,000.00 that you can loan me till I make it big time...LOL...saw that page...impressive if y got the cash.. ...

I'm still drooooling!

Hey, I tried to hit the wife up for a few coins, I can't repeat her comments, I dont think they make a rating for what she said!!!

960 cores - it could be done rendering even before you take your hand off the mouse!  :woot:

I always find it funny to see how quickly things are forgotten. Last century there was a computer called Thinking Machine - when I remember it right, 1000 processors. So doing this is not really new, hopefully the software integration works better this time than twenty years ago.

I would agree. 

If I remember correctly a fellow from England invented the Transputer more than a dozen years ago, but was kept out of the market with law suites as it had 4 cores at the time, and the big Chip makers did not want to hear about it.

Have not seen any tests but would certainly like to know how this machine would process 10 billion polies.

Won't be long to we have 32+ CPU cores, for our home PCs, doing real time unbiased rendering.
As I roughly said elsehwere today: once I did chrome spheres over water, now I do so much more, how things have changed in 10 years!!!

this is an unbiased render, doing tests of 3D modesl I made in Rhino, rendered in Maxwell.
not meant to be fine art just testing how the items looked :)

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/rhino/2008/accelerator27_800.jpg
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/rhino/2008/accelerator22.jpg
http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/rhino/2008/hammership43.jpg

Wonder how soon someone gets a program like Vue to work with that or the slightly more affordable Nvidia Tesla plug in cards (they look like big video cards). Some of us may be able to afford $1,700 before we can the super computer if the economy turns around.

YEP! 10 years is an eternity in this business.  It will be interesting to see where 3D and Vue go in another decade.  I hope Artists will still be around??

H*LL!  I will be too old to see the computer by then anyway! 

OptiTex, I believe the company DAZ was working with to generate cloth in studio and Carrara has re-designed their program to work with this Tesla/CUDA system, according to Nvidia's success story links.

What about this computer? You can get it for less than 10K$...

Bye!!!

From their press release, the Cray CX1 is using the Nvidia Tesla board. Cool stuff!

 It's really cool but wouldn't be practically unless you're (a) using CUDA-aware applications or (b) a saavy C programmer.

Another fact is that the nVidia board has a very high SINGLE precision performance while it is nothing exceptional in what matters, i.e. DOUBLE precision computations (LINPACK is always done in double precision). 7 digits are not enough when you have to performs long chains of computations. CX1 can be equipped with Xeon blades.

Bye!!!

I'm not even stunned by the price. The first computer they purchased for me at work, especially build to be able to handle PowerCAD 1 (a great autocad clone around 1990 or so, far more powerful then autocad was at that time), was around that price also. It was the i486DX  running at 33Mhz. The complete setup (with 20inch monitor and some other extra's) was over $20,000 at that time.

I recal buying my first computer half a year before that, a 286 16Mhz, really fast for it's time and one I could afford (386's weren't really affordable at that time) costs over $3,000 at the time.

Now you get a very decent pc for well under $1000.

The price doesn't suprise me, it's just back to the old days when the desicion was buy a new car or a new computer.....