I'd like to have an external weather machine, which precomputes global weather in coarse resolution (frontal systems, highs/lows, approx. snowlines, etc), and dynamically computes local weather, turbulence, updrafts/downdrafts, rain, snow, hail, virga, squall lines, T-storms, tornadoes, fog, dew, microbursts, icing, etc, in fine resolution. This is going to be a lot of CPU, for sure, but weather IS a huge part of flying.An aircraft dynamics, which takes up weather and other factors and computes my flight "as real as it gets", can migrate to PhysX-like units in the future. And rendering of all of that, well, it's another story (in another thread)... Another external system, all AI including ground and maritime traffic, can also be precomputed/dynamically computed on external engine, just because the world is alive beyond 50nm radius around an airplane.Wake me up in 2009 :)

Trust me you don't want to have the core systems such as weather, AI and FMC code running on another server. The network lag will kill that idea. For instance FS9 has enough issues just handling the CPU-GPU data transfers on the same box. External or listening type modules will be ok. So things like a moving map can run fine on another server. Multi-core systems will be giving the effect of multiple PC's anyway, though running on the same server. And remember, not long after FSX is released we will have quad core systems ready for us to buy :) Multi core systems running on Vista with DX10 (which uses 'long shaders' and takes alot of the heat off the CPU) will be giving a 'quantum leap' in performance. Give it some time you will see.

I agree that lan is not the same as a cluster, whereas a multi-core is more like a cluster, if a program can produce multiple threads instead of a single process. But even if it doesn't, something else can be run in parallel to FS on a second core, like a sophisticated weather sim. And if someone will offer it for a price of MSFS, I will probably buy it (but only if I don't get broke after I get my quad-core rig :) )