Thanks James for that, looking forward to it :) Will make my work on the laptop so much easier, as I will be able to use / buy one or multiple render slaves.

Hi Fredrik ;) thanks for posting, in short, we're likely going to replace tiled rendering with two different modes.

For animation rendering, we're going to use frame splitting where there is one frame worked on by each node. This will likely be more efficient since each node will be working independently and will immediately go to the next tile when it is finished

For single frame rendering we're experimenting with sample splitting. Cycles had this feature for a while and then we helped patch Blender to bring the same feature to cycles x as it was about to be dropped by the blender developers. Sample splitting allows a similar mechanism to frame splitting in that all the machines are independent of each other and work on different samples of the entire range of samples you request.

As for faster feedback, sample splitting offers the best way for this to happen since we can effectively return an image with just a few samples to begin with and then build on that.

As for when to expect this, probably the second half of the year.

Hope this helps :)

James