Sandman

Imagine working at kindercare. Imagine, for some reason, you want to make 8 kids count a hundred beads. First, you’d have to roughly split the stack into 8 groups. The kid with the smallest pile will have to wait for the kids that haven’t finished yet. You could divide the remainder of the beads as the kids count, but that will take up a lot of your time. That’s exactly the problem with multi-chip computers.

The spheres in the 3D scene above, the beads of my analogy, are semi-reflective and semi-transparent surrounded by 48 light sources. It’s hard for a computer to calculate how light will travel through this scene. The latest incarnation of my 3D software (Cinema 4D 11.5) manages to calculate the image 30% faster by optimizing the calculations so that 2 computer chip cores can work together more efficiently. That, my friends, is the future of software. More… »