Sony at SIGGRAPH? I thought it was a little strange but fiigured they were there to show off their PS3 gaming technology. Well, they were, kind of. Sony has taken its microprocessor developed for PS3 and using it as the hardware backbone of its new “Cell Computing Board”, a 1U sized server that can be mounted on a 19-inch rack. At the show Sony was showing how quickly the Cell Board processed 4K images.

Interestingly, Sony teamed up with Side Effects and incorporated the Houdini Batch and Mantra for the front end software.

This continued a general theme of this years SIGGRAPH where it seems that the animation software systems have matured enough (with still a few hurdles to overcome) that the focus now becomes on how to do it quicker, more efficiently and handle larger and larger file sizes, more and more polygons, while reaching up for the holy 4K grail. Softimage’s point release of XSI was all about new render partners and Autodesk’s new updates were all about effieciency. No real ‘sexy’ features added. Seems they are already fully sexed out and now that they they’ve been built for comfort the focus is to build them for speed.

The Sony and Houdini pairing seems like it would be a good fit, much as NVIDIA’s Gelato rendering software, which leverages and optimizes its own processors, is promising. Hardware and software working together. What a concept.