Dual Core? Definitely

Austin hinted on the X-Plane news list that X-Plane will in the future use a second core to load scenery much more smoothly than it does in the past. Each time we take a whack at the scenery load code, we reduce the load time by a significant multiple, so we're still not at truly no-pause flying, but we will be getting a lot closer in the future.

A few years ago when people asked "should I get a dual CPU machine" (this was before dual-core chips were ubiquitous) I hesitated to say yes. This is on longer the case - dual core is definitely the way you want to go.

The price performance curve is such that dual core chips are definitely in the sweet spot. In the past a true dual CPU machine costed big bucks, but now unless you buy the absolute cheapest machine, you're going to get a dual core chip. I never recommend buying the absolute cheapest hardware -- usually to get those last few dollars of price savings, the machine (or GPU) has been stripped down of major features, so you're losing tons of performance for really marginal savings in dollars.

X-Plane's usage of the second core has gone up too, already in 860 and the second core will be even more important in version 9.

Our usage of the second core isn't about trying to raise X-Plane's system requirements, it's about not leaving "money on the table". We need to make X-Plane run efficiently as possible on as many combinations of hardware as possible. This means giving you the best flight sim experience you can get whether you have an older single-core machine with a low-end graphics card or a new dual-core chip with the latest huge graphics card and four tons of VRAM.

The important thing here is: usage of dual core chips requires code changes. We have to write new code in X-Plane to teach it how to safely run some work on one core and other work on another. This is all about efficiency - if you have a dual-core chip there is nothing efficient about leaving one core doing nothing! We'd be leaving half the computing power of the chip idle.

So if you don't have a dual-core chip, the sim will still run (just as it does now). But whereas the gap between single and dual-core chips is smaller now (because the dual-core users have half a chip idle a lot of the time), the gap will become larger as we utilize the second core more fully and dual-core users get to really take advantage of all of that computing power.