I've not seen this high memory usage claimed. I've only 1GB Ram total and Carrara only seems to claim about 500mb for this image which as I mentioned is rendered at quite a small size. One thing that is quite unique about this is that the textures are nearly all procedural.

However, I agree that it would appear that raw processing power would seem to be more important for the performance here. This is infact backed up with an article from Intel who are bringing out a quad core processor next year.

http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2006/08/27/parallel_worlds/1.html

Don't forget that those 64bit processors can access more than 4GB. There's also PAE memory but I've only ever seen that on servers.

Question? Is Carrara supported on these 64bit and dual core processors? Can it take advantage?