In planning a future "graphics workstation" hypothetical, after having looked over Blender's dependencies I'm quite settled on the hardware I'd want for it.
In mid-20'00s terms... PS3-style "Synergistic Porcessing Units" with a XBox360-style GPU (which basically any GPU now) coordinated by (for the sake of it) a Reduceron.
The GPU would provide large quantities of fully-programmable (if memory-constrained) "compute units", to concurrently process large collections of data.
1/2?