I'm getting access to a Sun box, so the SunOS POV-Ray should be updated
from 3.02 in the near future.  Hard to tell at this point what the
performance will be like, but it's not going to be any more threaded
than any of the other versions (i.e. not at all).  It's my feeling that
it's not practical (without major rewrite, increase in burden of
maintenance) to add support for threading to the official POV-Ray at
this point, due largely to the need to keep the rendering engine
portable across so many platforms.

As for Dennis' efforts to support a threaded POV-Ray: be my guest.  If
it will require changes to files outside the unix directory in the
source tree, it probably can't be incorporated into an official version,
but I have no problems with platform-specific enhancements that boost
performance on some platforms (e.g. PVMPOV) as long as they abide by the
license.  In theory, ray tracing should thread wonderfully, and users of
SMP machines could see a great deal of benefit.

-- 
Mark Gordon
mtg### [at] povrayorg

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