Thanks Jon for your reply. The lack of interest to this thread was such that I was starting to think that it's useless to even talk about Carrara's future

Anyhow, most, if not all, ray-tracers use a light ray sampling technique called Monte-Carlo method. The maths details are complex, but you can check them out in the links below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_method

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_ray_tracing

Carrara too uses the Monte-Carlo method for rendering. I know, because I read it in a RDS 2.0 or RDS 3.0 product brochure a very long time ago.

The bulk of Carrara was written at a time when a 100 MHz Pentium II with 64MB RAM was the cream of the crop. So I assume that their implementation of the Monte-Carlo method is (or was) a scaled-down implementation so it can run fast enough on the computers of those glorious times. Even  more so that Carrara (or RDS) was designed for hobbyists and semi-pros market with limited computer equipment budget.

The Monte-Carlo sampling routines are buried deep inside Carrara's renderer, and I doubt that they have undergone much improvements since the RDS glorious times.

Intel has designed a new implementation of the Monte-Carlo method that takes full advantage of its newest processors graphic architecture. In their video presentation they claim that their implementation of Monte-Carlo method scales very well to mutiple cpu's/cores/threads and I have no reason to doubt their claim.

These routines will not replace Carrara's native renderer. They will only replace the underlying sampling routines upon which the native renderer is built. Intel has done it very intelligently, as demonstraed by Cinema4D's demo.

Replacing Carrara's scaled-down and outdated Monte-Carlo routines with Intel's state-of-the-art implementation should not take more than 6 months for a developer who knows what he/she is doing, especially since Embree's source code seems to be really small.

The reason I say it could speed-up Carrara's native renderer by 2000% to 3000% is a guess based on Cinema4D's demo where they claim a 300% speed improvement using Embree. Given that Cinema4D's renderer is super-fast, probably 10 times faster than Carrara's, I guessed that these routines could well speed-up Carrara's renderer by as much as 3000%.

I agree with you that if Embree finds its way into Carrara's native renderer it would be such an added value that upgrading to C9 will become a must.