Remember the joke of “never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of hard drives”? That’s the render farm. Throw a ton of work at it, and it’ll get done faster than a big single machine could. What would have taken a week now takes a day.
The Mac Pro in our analogy is 5G wireless: not nearly as much bandwidth as the 747, but at much lower latency. Lots of interactive/real time applications are possible that in a farm would be bottlenecked by network bandwidth alone.
Besides, we’re already using render farms where each machine has 20+ cores and 256GB RAM. A future render farm might as well be built from machines with specs similar to the new Mac PRo.
The Mac Pro in our analogy is 5G wireless: not nearly as much bandwidth as the 747, but at much lower latency. Lots of interactive/real time applications are possible that in a farm would be bottlenecked by network bandwidth alone.