I still can't find any info other than the bit above by MOSFET (thanks man)
I did find reference to a partnership between Otoy and Silicon Studio from the 22nd but I can't tell if Octane is an asset in that? Otoy don't even mention Octane in their press release. I wonder if Octane would get more customers if people knew it existed
Anyway a 4x speed improvement kinda seems like it ought to be impossible to do with the present basis of Octane. I wonder if the core is being ripped out for a Brigade based product instead and that will be the basis for the cloud version? Something more like Nvidia Optix perhaps? Octane tech does seem to be a bit of a limb in the wrong direction given Otoys other activities/direction and the animation/film/visualisation industry has more of a real time emphasis. Alembic support would be another nod in that direction.
Who am I to say but it has seemed to me for a while the number of new customers for Octane probably doesn't cover the wages that go into it and the pace of development is somewhat reluctant..
Maybe a fundamental shift is in the pipeline....
Hopefully someone from Otoy can provide some useful detail about their future activities 'soon'